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American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925-1975

Catherine R. Osborne

This book asks why 20th century American Catholics stopped building churches that looked back to the middles ages, and began building churches that for the present and the future. It argues that ... More

This book asks why 20th century American Catholics stopped building churches that looked back to the middles ages, and began building churches that for the present and the future. It argues that belief in an evolutionary universe, a biological paradigm, united Catholic liturgists and modernist architects, enabling the development of a futurist architecture. The book explores the use of architectural models and theologians' and architects' interest in the latest technological developments. It traces the influence of theologians like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, and Harvey Cox on American Catholics' ideas about worship space. Finally, it examines post-Vatican II renovations and experimentation with the location and arrangement of worship space in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Combining social, cultural, intellectual, and architectural history, the book weaves a story about how American Catholics in a dramatically changing world explored the future of their Church through their ideas about the future of the church building.Less

God's Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War

Sarah Ruth Hammond

Darren Dochuk (ed.)

God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War chronicles the lives, businesses, and ministries of several Christian corporate leaders, whose religious and political activism ... More

God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War chronicles the lives, businesses, and ministries of several Christian corporate leaders, whose religious and political activism between the 1920s and 1940s laid the foundations of the modern religious right. Challenging prevailing scholarly opinion that evangelicals—“fundamentalists,” as they were known then—remained apolitical and otherworldly in the Interwar period, this book carefully outlines how Christian businessmen such as R.G. LeTourneau and Herbert J. Taylor, leading figures in this account, grappled with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and during World War II. While on their factory floors and in their boardrooms they folded evangelical principles into manufacturing and managerial strategies, in their church spheres they financed evangelical causes and pushed clergy to tap laymen’s proselytizing energy. At the same time, they brought their conservative theology to bear on critical political issues such as taxation, government regulation, labor unions and workers rights, and the challenge, as they saw it, to uphold private enterprise against “big government” and the spread of socialist and communist subversion. The ideas and institutions they advanced in this political moment served as a base from which post-World War II religious and political conservatives would spread their gospel.Less

Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy

K. Healan Gaston

The claim that the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” nation emerged in the 1930s and remains central to American political culture today, even as its political resonances have shifted. This book ... More

The claim that the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” nation emerged in the 1930s and remains central to American political culture today, even as its political resonances have shifted. This book offers the first comprehensive history of America’s Judeo-Christian discourse, from its nineteenth-century prehistory right up to the present. By examining the public debates around Judeo-Christian formulations of democracy and American national identity, the book reveals sharp disagreements between various groups of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers over church-state relations and religion’s place in a democratic polity more generally. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it shows, a host of commentators championed what the author calls “Judeo-Christian exceptionalism”: the argument that democracy rests on ethical and theological commitments shared by Jews and Christians. They used the pejorative term “secularism” to contend that denying the political centrality of the Judeo-Christian faiths—as did Christian and Jewish supporters of strict church-state separation, as well as skeptics and religious minorities outside the Judeo-Christian fold—would eradicate religion by completely secularizing American public life. In response, these pluralists insisted that democracy required tolerance of all beliefs, religious and otherwise. Their view made significant headway in the 1960s, as the Catholic Church embraced church-state separation and American liberals largely abandoned the “Judeo-Christian” label, even as a shorthand term for the country’s religious demography. Meanwhile, the emerging Christian right picked up the Judeo-Christian discourse and turned it toward the much more conservative ends that characterize its most visible uses today.Less

The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

Jason A. Josephson-Storm

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, ... More

A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? This book traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, it argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.Less

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

John Corrigan

Religious intolerance has been constant in American history. The dominant religious community for most of American history, comprised of the mainline and evangelical Protestant groups, refused to ... More

Religious intolerance has been constant in American history. The dominant religious community for most of American history, comprised of the mainline and evangelical Protestant groups, refused to recognize their intolerance. Instead, they imagined religious intolerance as the problem of foreign countries. Repressing memory of their own culpability in fomenting domestic religious intolerance, they projected the problem of religious intolerance overseas. Over time, as their power in America declined, they increasingly identified with the persecuted Christians around the world whose trials they chronicled. Eventually, they came to understand themselves as a persecuted group alongside those whom they observed overseas.Less