Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The Younger Lippmann
1: The Disciple, 1889-1913
2: The Theologian, 1913-1930
3: The Priest, 1913-1930
Part II: The Older Lippmann
4: The Evangelist, 1930-1939
5: The Prophet, 1939-1949
6: The Shepherd, 1949-1960
7: The Heretic, 1960-1974
Epilogue: Saint Walter
Selected Bibliography
Index
Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at
Spring Arbor University in Michigan. He has published articles in
Religion and American Culture, Diplomatic History, Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions, Religions, and the Journal of
Religious History. He is the author of The Right of the Protestant
Left: God's Totalitarianism (2012) and Faith and Foreign Affairs
in
the American Century (2019). In the Spring of 2018, he served as
Fulbright Senior Scholar to Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in
Seoul, Korea, where he taught American diplomatic history.
Edwards shows us that Walter Lippmann was a paradox: in his
personal life, he projected a "nothing to see here" attitude toward
religion, but he made a career of his public writing about morals.
He decried religious institutions and insisted on their value.
Edwards sees Lippmann's story as about secularism, liberalism,
Christianity, post Christianity, and Judaism; he shows the tensions
between political power and historical perspective. Edwards gives
us not only a religious biography of Lippmann, but also a brilliant
new angle on the religious biography of the US across the decades
of the American century.
*Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University, Bloomington*
Mark Edwards' exhaustively documented, analytically ambitious study
of Walter Lippmann's career argues that the notorious
contradictions, conceits, and blind spots in Lippmann's writings
are largely explained by a quasi religious quest for a national
community that is at once post Judaic, post Catholic, and post
Protestant. By ascribing to Lippmann's secularism a sense of
religious mission grounded in a decidedly Judeo-Christian matrix,
Edwards brings a fresh perspective to one of the most studied of
American intellectuals. Against the many observers who have
emphasized the "integrity" and "wisdom" of Lippmann's performance
as a public moralist, Edwards insists that Lippmann was a
"chameleon," whose brilliance functioned as a vehicle for a virtual
infinity of American virtues and vices.
*David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley*
Mark Edwards smartly situates Walter Lippmann smack dab in the
thicket of American exceptionalism and its religious facets. As
such, Edwards' book is a welcome reminder of a public intellectual
whose insights were arguably wiser than Reinhold Niebuhr's.
Edwards' Lippmann could well turn out to be the better guide to the
spiritual dilemmas of the United States' global dominance in the
twentieth century than any voice the nationâs churches
produced.
*D. G. Hart, Hillsdale College, Michigan, Russian Review*
This slim but fruitful volume is the rare book that
reconceptualizes the thought of a well-researched thinker in a way
that illuminates rather than distracts...Highly recommended.
Undergraduates through faculty.
*Choice*
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