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Author: Isaac Barnes May Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197624235 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
"This book is about the relationship between the American religious left and secularization. It explores how three liberal religions -liberal Quakers, Unitarians, and Reconstructionist Jews- attempted to preserve their traditions in the modern world by redefining what it meant to be religious. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, these groups underwent the most massive theological change imaginable, allowing their members to opt not to believe in a personal God. As the God of traditional theism did not seem to fit into a post-Darwinian framework, these traditions took the dramatic step of redefining that concept to make a "God" that did fit, and eventually they went even further by making belief in God a matter of purely personal preference. This book narrates how, over the course of the twentieth century, believing in God and being religious became increasingly disconnected. It documents the continuance of these religious communities even after the theological rationales that originally brought them together disappeared, their communal identities instead becoming focused on humanitarian service and political commitments, which began to replace a shared adherence to theism. The radical religious views of these small liberal denominations became influential among the wider society, and eventually became accepted in American popular culture and law"--
Author: Isaac Barnes May Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197624235 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
"This book is about the relationship between the American religious left and secularization. It explores how three liberal religions -liberal Quakers, Unitarians, and Reconstructionist Jews- attempted to preserve their traditions in the modern world by redefining what it meant to be religious. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, these groups underwent the most massive theological change imaginable, allowing their members to opt not to believe in a personal God. As the God of traditional theism did not seem to fit into a post-Darwinian framework, these traditions took the dramatic step of redefining that concept to make a "God" that did fit, and eventually they went even further by making belief in God a matter of purely personal preference. This book narrates how, over the course of the twentieth century, believing in God and being religious became increasingly disconnected. It documents the continuance of these religious communities even after the theological rationales that originally brought them together disappeared, their communal identities instead becoming focused on humanitarian service and political commitments, which began to replace a shared adherence to theism. The radical religious views of these small liberal denominations became influential among the wider society, and eventually became accepted in American popular culture and law"--
Author: Randall Herbert Balmer Publisher: ISBN: Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
Covering Protestant, Hindu, Jewish, New Age, Mormon, Buddhist, Roman Catholic, and many other faiths, Religion in Twentieth Century America is a dynamic look at religion in America through two World Wars, vast industrialization, the civil rights movement, and massive immigration. Included are crucial moments, such as: * The appointment of Louis Brandeis, a Jew, to the U.S. Supreme Court * The contentious court trial of John T. Scopes, which dramatized the debate over Darwinism * The extraordinary rise of evangelist Billy Graham at mid-century * The Presbyterian church's decision to ordain women *The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. *The federal government's decision to attack the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. With a chronology, index, and suggestions for further reading following, these momentous events and others are tied together in an absorbing narrative in Religion in Twentieth Century America, providing an illuminating guide to the complex issues of 21st-century religion
Author: Amanda Porterfield Professor of Religious Studies University of Wyoming Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0198030088 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 274
Book Description
As recently as a few decades ago, most people would have described America as a predominantly Protestant nation. Today, we are home to a colorful mix of religious faiths and practices, from a resurgent Catholic Church and a rapidly growing Islam to all forms of Buddhism and many other non-Christian religions. How did this startling transformation take place? A great many factors contributed to this transformation, writes Amanda Porterfield in this engaging look at religion in contemporary America. Religious activism, disillusionment with American culture stemming from the Vietnam war, the influx of Buddhist ideas, a heightened consciousness of gender, and the vastly broadened awareness of non-Christian religions arising from the growth of religious studies programs--all have served to undermine Protestant hegemony in the United States. But the single most important factor, says Porterfield, was the very success of Protestant ways of thinking: emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, tension between spiritual life and religious institutions, egalitarian ideas about spiritual life, and belief in the practical benefits of spirituality. Distrust of religious institutions, for instance, helped fuel a religious counterculture--the tendency to define spiritual truth against the dangers or inadequacies of the surrounding culture--and Protestantism's pragmatic view of spirituality played into the tendency to see the main function of religion as therapeutic. For anyone interested in how and why the American religious landscape has been so dramatically altered in the last forty years, The Transformation of Religion in America offers a coherent and persuasive analysis.
Author: Charles L. Cohen Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199931925 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 406
Book Description
Religious pluralism has characterized America almost from its seventeenth-century inception, but the past half century or so has witnessed wholesale changes in the religious landscape. Gods in America brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.
Author: Michael James Lacey Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This volume studies the persistence, complexity, and fragility of religious thought in the intellectual environment of the modern period.
Author: Benjamin E. Zeller Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 0814797210 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
By the twentieth century, science had become so important that religious traditions had to respond to it. Emerging religions, still led by a living founder to guide them, responded with a clarity and focus that illuminates other larger, more established religions’ understandings of science. The Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and Heaven’s Gate each found distinct ways to incorporate major findings of modern American science, understanding it as central to their wider theological and social agendas. In tracing the development of these new religious movements’ viewpoints on science during each movement’s founding period, we can discern how their views on science were crafted over time. These NRMs shed light on how religious groups—new, old, alternative, or mainstream—could respond to the tremendous growth of power and prestige of science in late twentieth-century America. In this engrossing book, Zeller carefully shows that religious groups had several methods of creatively responding to science, and that the often-assumed conflict-based model of “science vs. religion” must be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of how religions operate in our modern scientific world.
Author: Isaac Barnes May
Author: Isaac Barnes May
Author: Randall Herbert Balmer
Author: Amanda Porterfield Professor of Religious Studies University of Wyoming
Author: Charles L. Cohen
Author: Michael James Lacey
Author: Herbert Wallace Schneider
Author: Benjamin E. Zeller
Author: H. W. Schneider
Author: Martin E. Marty
Author: Peter W. Williams