Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Planting Pluralism in the United States; Chapter 2 The Shifting Public Presence of Mainline Protestantism; Chapter 3 Pluralism’s Promise and Perils: American Catholicism in the Twentieth Century; Chapter 4 The Paradox of Pluralism: The Jewish Experience; Chapter 5 Religion and the Pride of a People: Black Religion in the United States; Chapter 6 Syncretism and Pluralism: Native American Experiences in the Twentieth Century; Chapter 7 Personal Religious Expression in a Pluralistic Culture; Chapter 8 The Proliferation of Pluralism; Chapter 9 The Politics of Religion in a Pluralistic Society; Chapter 10 Pluralistic Turns in American Religious Thought; Chapter 11 The Persistence of Pluralism;

About the Author

Charles H. Lippy

Reviews

In this brief text, Lippy (religious studies, Univ. of Tennessee; Being Religious, American Style) displays the wide and wild diversity of American religious expression over the course of the 20th century. To do justice to its material, the book should be twice as long. It lacks a clear interpretive framework to move the material beyond a recital of detail, most of it sketchily, and sometimes misleadingly, presented. Successive chapters portray the diversity within mainstream Protestant, Catholic, African American, Jewish, and Native American communities and their development over the course of the century. Additional chapters address developments in personal spirituality, non-Western and new religions, and the changing role of religion in political life. The text is useful as a general overview and guide to the literature of the field surveyed in the excellent notes and bibliography. Readers, however, will hunger for expanded accounts of people and events that would bring the text to life and for evidence to back up the historical generalizations that sprinkle every page. Recommended for college libraries.DSteve Young, Montclair State Univ., NJ Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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 outdatedÄthe focus on pluralism itself seems pass‚. Herberg's book, though half a century old, is a more invigorating read. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.