Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Lippy, Charles H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765601516 ISBN 13: 9780765601513

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

Synopsis

This acclaimed work surveys the varied course of religious life in modern America. Beginning with the close of the Victorian Age, it moves through the shifting power of Protestantism and American Catholicism and into the intense period of immigration and pluralism that has characterized our nation's religious experience.

About this title

About the Author:

CHARLES H. LIPPY is LeRoy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is author or editor of Pluralism Comes of Age: American Religious Culture in the Twentieth Century, Being Religious, American Style: A History of Popular Religiosity in the United States (Greenwood), Christianity Comes to the Americas, 1492-1776, Twentieth-Century Shapers of American Popular Religion (Greenwood), Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, and other titles.

From Publishers Weekly:

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's Lippy suggests that the increasing diversity of religious culture is the key to American religion in the 20th century. The groundwork for religious pluralism, he argues, was laid during the Victorian era, when Catholic and Jewish immigrants from all over Europe moved to American cities in record numbers; by 1955, sociologist Will Herberg could assert that most Americans accorded equal respect to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. But Lippy never ventures far beyond Herberg's assessment. His cursory treatment of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists is squeezed into a chapter that's not even 20 pages long, and much of the book is derivative. Lippy doesn't have anything new to say about African-American religion, Native American syncretism, Vatican II, the lynching of Leo Frank or the culture of therapy. He gestures in the direction of originality when he touches on the Chicken Soup series, the What Would Jesus Do? craze and Generation X spirituality, but the few paragraphs we get on those subjects are too brief to amount to much. It is not just the recycling of familiar material that makes the book seem outdatedAthe focus on pluralism itself seems pass?. Herberg's book, though half a century old, is a more invigorating read. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0765601516
• ISBN 13: 9780765601513
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 251