Download or read book The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace written by Robert S. Ellwood and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellwood frames his detailed and lively account with the provocative idea of the fifties as a "supply-side" free enterprise spiritual marketplace, with heady competition between religious groups and leaders, and with church attendance at a record high.

Download or read book The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace written by Robert S. Ellwood and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you still hold the notion that the fifties were the "good old days," blessed with incomparable social affluence and widespread family unity, all buttressed by a strong, unconflicted spirituality, then look again. In this compelling narrative of religion in a decade still embraced by an indefatigable nostalgia, Robert Ellwood interrogates the notion of the fifties as an era of normalcy, and proves it to be full of spiritual strife. A companion to his Sixties Spiritual Awakening, Ellwood explores the major Catholic-Protestant tensions of the decade, the conflict between theology and popular faith, and the underground forms of fifties religiosity like "Beat" Zen, UFO contactees, Thomas Merton monasticism, and the Joseph Campbell / Carl Jung revival of mythology. Ellwood frames his detailed and lively account with the provocative idea of the fifties as a "supply-side" free enterprise spiritual marketplace, with heady competition between religious groups and leaders, and with church attendance at a record high. In addition to challenging an idealistic fifties cultural milieu, the book analyzes American religious responses to key historical events like the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the civil rights movement, turning a religious lens on the cultural history of the United States.

Download or read book Spiritual Marketplace written by Wade Clark Roof and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-02 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In large chain bookstores the "religion" section is gone and in its place is an expanding number of topics including angels, Sufism, journey, recovery, meditation, magic, inspiration, Judaica, astrology, gurus, Bible, prophesy, evangelicalism, Mary, Buddhism, Catholicism, and esoterica. As Wade Clark Roof notes, such changes over the last two decades reflect a shift away from religion as traditionally understood to more diverse and creative approaches. But what does this splintering of the religious perspective say about Americans? Have we become more interested in spiritual concerns or have we become lost among trends? Do we value personal spirituality over traditional religion and no longer see ourselves united in a larger community of faith? Roof first credited this religious diversity to the baby boomers in his bestselling A Generation of Seekers (1993). He returns to interview many of these people, now in mid-life, to reveal a generation with a unique set of spiritual values--a generation that has altered our historic interpretations of religious beliefs, practices, and symbols, and perhaps even our understanding of the sacred itself. The quest culture created by the baby boomers has generated a "marketplace" of new spiritual beliefs and practices and of revisited traditions. As Roof shows, some Americans are exploring faiths and spiritual disciplines for the first time; others are rediscovering their lost traditions; others are drawn to small groups and alternative communities; and still others create their own mix of values and metaphysical beliefs. Spiritual Marketplace charts the emergence of five subcultures: dogmatists, born-again Christians, mainstream believers, metaphysical believers and seekers, and secularists. Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews for over a decade, Roof reports on the religious and spiritual styles, family patterns, and moral vision and values for each of these subcultures. The result is an innovative, engaging approach to understanding how religious life is being reshaped as we move into the next century.

Download or read book The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace written by Amy Slagle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many Americans, the Eastern Orthodox converts in this study are participants in what scholars today refer to as the "spiritual marketplace" or quest culture of expanding religious diversity and individual choice-making that marks the post-World War II American religious landscape. In this highly readable ethnographic study, Slagle explores the ways in which converts, clerics, and lifelong church members use marketplace metaphors in describing and enacting their religious lives. Slagle conducted participant observation and formal semi-structured interviews in Orthodox churches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Jackson, Mississippi. Known among Orthodox Christians as the "Holy Land" of North American Orthodoxy, Pittsburgh offers an important context for exploring the interplay of Orthodox Christianity with the mainstreams of American religious life. Slagle's second round of research in Jackson sheds light on the American Bible Belt where over the past thirty years the Orthodox Church in America has marshaled significant resources to build mission parishes. Relatively few ethnographic studies have examined Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, and Slagle's book fills a significant gap. This lucidly written book is an ideal selection for courses in the sociology and anthropology of religion, contemporary Christianity, and religious change. Scholars of Orthodox Christianity, as well as clerical and lay people interested in Eastern Orthodoxy, will find this book to be of great appeal.

Download or read book The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline written by Elesha J. Coffman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline offers the first full-length, critical study of The Christian Century, widely regarded as the most influential religious magazine in America for most of the twentieth century and hailed by Time as "Protestantism's most vigorous voice." Elesha Coffman narrates the previously untold story of the magazine, exploring its chronic financial struggles, evolving editorial positions, and often fractious relations among writers, editors, and readers, as well as the central role it played in the rise of mainline Protestantism. Coffman situates this narrative within larger trends in American religion and society. Under the editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison from 1908-1947, the magazine spoke out about many of the most pressing social and political issues of the time, from child labor and women's suffrage to war, racism, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It published such luminaries as Jane Addams, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King Jr. and jostled with the Nation, the New Republic, and Commonweal, as it sought to enlarge its readership and solidify its position as the voice of liberal Protestantism. But by the 1950s, internal strife between liberals and neo-orthodox and the rising challenge of Billy Graham's evangelicalism would shatter the illusion of Protestant consensus. The coalition of highly educated, theologically and politically liberal Protestants associated with the magazine made a strong case for their own status as shepherds of the American soul but failed to attract a popular following that matched their intellectual and cultural clout. Elegantly written and persuasively argued, The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline takes readers inside one of the most important religious magazines of the modern era.

Download or read book Decoding Modern Consumer Societies written by H. Berghoff and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of studies of Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, the contributions gathered here consider how political history, business history, the history of science, cultural history, gender history, intellectual history, anthropology, and even environmental history can help us decode modern consumer societies.

Download or read book McCarthyism in the Suburbs written by Allison Hepler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1953, Mary Knowles was fired as a branch librarian for the Morrill Memorial Library, a public library in Norwood, Massachusetts. She had been called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and, when asked if she’d ever been a member of the Communist Party, she declined to answer, relying on her Fifth Amendment rights. She was fired less than three weeks later. Knowles thought she was unlikely to find a position as a librarian again and left the area. She found a job at a small library outside Philadelphia, where anticommunists who learned of her past tried to create public support for a Loyalty Oath, resulting in the loss of public funding for the library. The resulting controversy eventually brought national attention to the local Quakers who had hired Knowles, the FBI was asked to investigate, Knowles was convicted of contempt of Congress, and the Quakers were subpoenaed and testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Knowles, however, was never fired from this position, retiring from the library in 1979. This book illustrates the impact of McCarthyism on small towns and “ordinary” people and local officials, some of whom abided by the standards of the era. There were others however, who challenged the status quo. Their actions provide readers with models of behavior often at odds with what has been thought of as the 1950s. People who spoke up risked families and jobs. At the same time, anticommunists also tapped into citizens’ fears of the cold war, not just of Communists but of a broad swath of people who promoted social justice and equality. The resulting interactions as described in this book offer important lessons on how fear and bravery operate local communities against the backdrop of (and involvement with) national events.

Download or read book Countercultural Conservatives written by Axel R. Schäfer and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-twentieth century, far more evangelicals supported such “liberal” causes as peace, social justice, and environmental protection. Only gradually did the conservative evangelical faction win dominance, allying with the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and, eventually, George W. Bush. In Countercultural Conservatives Axel Schäfer traces the evolution of a diffuse and pluralistic movement into the political force of the New Christian Right. In forging its complex theological and political identity, evangelicalism did not simply reject the ideas of 1960s counterculture, Schäfer argues. For all their strict Biblicism and uncompromising morality, evangelicals absorbed and extended key aspects of the countercultural worldview. Carefully examining evangelicalism’s internal dynamics, fissures, and coalitions, this book offers an intriguing reinterpretation of the most important development in American religion and politics since World War II.

Download or read book God Fearing and Free written by Jason W. Stevens and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism. Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion. Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it—effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered.

Download or read book Knocking on Heaven s Door written by Mark Oppenheimer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that the various aspects of the "counterculture" of the 1960s had a significant impact on American religious institutions.

Download or read book American Culture in the 1950s written by Martin Halliwell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a stimulating account of the dominant cultural forms of 1950s America: fiction and poetry; theatre and performance; film and television; music and radio; and the visual arts. Through detailed commentary and focused case studies of influential texts and events - from Invisible Man to West Side Story, from Disneyland to the Seattle World's Fair, from Rear Window to The Americans - the book examines the way in which modernism and the cold war offer two frames of reference for understanding the trajectory of postwar culture. The two core aims of this volume are to chart the changing complexion of American culture in the years following World War II and to provide readers with a critical investigation of 'the 1950s'. The book provides an intellectual context for approaching 1950s American culture and considers the historical impact of the decade on recent social and cultural developments.

Download or read book Daily Life in 1950s America written by Nancy Hendricks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-02-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing the era firmly within the American experience, this reference illuminates what daily life was really like in the 1950s, including for people from the "Other America"—those outside the prosperous, white middle class. 'Daily Life in 1950s America shows that the era was anything but uneventful. Apart from revolutionary changes during the decade itself, it was in the 1950s that the seeds took root for the social turmoil of the 1960s and the technological world of today. The book's interdisciplinary format looks at the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious life of average Americans. Readers can look at sections separately according to their interests or classroom assignment, or can read them as an ongoing narrative. By entering the homes of average Americans, far from the corridors of power, we can make sense of the 1950s and see how the headlines of the era translated into their daily lives. This readable and informative book is ideal for anyone interested in this formative decade in American life. Well-researched factual material is presented in an engaging way, along with lively sidebars to humanize each section. It is unique in blending the history, popular culture, and sociology of American daily life, including those of Americans who were not white, middle class, and prosperous.

Download or read book American Literature in Transition 1950 1960 written by Steven Belletto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 explores the under-recognized complexity and variety of 1950s American literature by focalizing discussions through a series of keywords and formats that encourage readers to draw fresh connections among literary form and concepts, institutions, cultures, and social phenomena important to the decade. The first section draws attention to the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena that were new to the 1950s. The second section demonstrates the range of subject positions important in the 1950s, but still not visible in many accounts of the era. The third section explores key literary schools or movements associated with the decade, and explains how and why they developed at this particular cultural moment. The final section focuses on specific forms or genres that grew to special prominence during the 1950s. Taken together, the chapters in the four sections not only encourage us to rethink familiar texts and figures in new lights, but they also propose new archives for future study of the decade.

Download or read book The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism written by Elesha J. Coffman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1972 publication of Dean M. Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, discussion of the Protestant mainline has focused on the tradition's decline. Elesha J. Coffman's The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism tells a different story, using the lens of the influential periodical The Christian Century to examine the rise of the mainline to a position of cultural prominence in the first half of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Alan Watts in Late Twentieth Century Discourse written by Peter J. Columbus and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an anthology of commentary and criticism written within the transitional period between Alan Watts’ 1973 death and the twenty-first century intellectual horizon. Comprised of 16 chapters written and published between 1974 and 1994, with up-to-date introductions from the essayists and other contemporary thinkers, this volume opens a window onto unexplored grounds of Alan Watts’ impact within late-twentieth-century discourse – an intermediate space where scholars reoriented their bearings through changing times and emerging academic trends. Offering varied explanations and assessments of Alan Watts, including his influence on the Beat and Hippie generations, and his popularization of Zen Buddhism in America, it tackles unaddressed questions within the milieu of late-twentieth-century America from the Reagan Revolution and religious conservatism, to paradigm shifts in Buddhist studies and the rise of post-colonial theory. Contributors’ post-mortem analyses and critiques of Watts allow for a thematic rendering of their consonance or dissonance with noted Beat, Hippie, and Zen Buddhism themes of his lifetime. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, the psychology of religion, comparative religion, and American studies.

Download or read book Noble Powell and the Episcopal Establishment in the Twentieth Century written by David Hein and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2007-05-01 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The quintessential man for his own season, Noble Powell (1891-1968) was an episcopal priest and then bishop who epitomized the cultural and ecclesiastical epoch before the tumultuous sixties. This volume, the first biography devoted to a dynamic churchman often referred to as "the last bishop of the old church", fills a major gap in American religious historiography while illuminating the strengths, flaws, and eventual decline of the Protestant establishment in the United States. Deeply influenced by the beliefs and practices of a mix of southern denominations, Powell was raised a Baptist and confirmed (to his family's chagrin) in the Episcopal Church. As parson at the University of Virginia, Powell led a flourishing student ministry before serving successively as rector of Emmanuel Church in Baltimore, dean of the National Cathedral, and bishop of the Diocese of Maryland. Hein sketches the spiritual depth, self-discipline, sense of humor, and personal magnetism that anchored Powell's unwavering commitment to the human side of the church. He shows how Powell's outlook as bishop dovetailed with the prevailing temper of his time and also discusses how Powell's leadership style, marked by patience and an aristocratic civility, diminished in effectiveness amid the upheaval of the 1960s.

Download or read book Getting Religion written by Kenneth L. Woodward and published by Convergent Books. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this thoughtful book, Ken Woodward offers us a memorable portrait of the past seven decades of American life and culture. From Reinhold Niebuhr to Billy Graham, from Abraham Heschel to the Dali Lama, from George W. Bush to Hillary Clinton, Woodward captures the personalities and charts the philosophical trends that have shaped the way we live now." –Jon Meacham, author of Destiny and Power Impeccably researched, thought-challenging and leavened by wit, Getting Religion, the highly-anticipated new book from Kenneth L. Woodward, is ideal perfect for readers looking to understand how religion came to be a contentious element in 21st century public life. Here the award-winning author blends memoir (especially of the postwar era) with copious reporting and shrewd historical analysis to tell the story of how American religion, culture and politics influenced each other in the second half of the 20th century. There are few people writing today who could tell this important story with such authority and insight. A scholar as well as one of the nation’s most respected journalists, Woodward served as Newsweek’s religion editor for nearly forty years, reporting from five continents and contributing over 700 articles, including nearly 100 cover stories, on a wide range of social issues, ideas and movements. Beginning with a bold reassessment of the Fifties, Woodward’s narrative weaves through Civil Rights era and the movements that followed in its wake: the anti-Vietnam movement; Liberation theology in Latin America; the rise of Evangelicalism and decline of mainline Protestantism; women’s liberation and Bible; the turn to Asian spirituality; the transformation of the family and emergence of religious cults; and the embrace of righteous politics by both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Along the way, Woodward provides riveting portraits of many of the era’s major figures: preachers like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell; politicians Mario Cuomo and Hillary Clinton; movement leaders Daniel Berrigan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Richard John Neuhaus; influential thinkers ranging from Erik Erikson to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross; feminist theologians Rosemary Reuther and Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza; and est impresario Werner Erhardt; plus the author’s long time friend, the Dalai Lama. For readers interested in how religion, economics, family life and politics influence each other, Woodward introduces fresh a fresh vocabulary of terms such as “embedded religion,” “movement religion” and “entrepreneurial religion” to illuminate the interweaving of the secular and sacred in American public life. This is one of those rare books that changes the way Americans think about belief, behavior and belonging.