About the Author

Martin E. Marty is co-director of the Fundamentalism Project and the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of modern Christianity at the University of Chicago. He is the senior editor of Christian Century. His many books include the multivolume Modern American Religion, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

Marty, who won the National Book Award for Righteous Empire (LJ 10/1/70), is a respected authority on American religion. Like the first two of his four-volume survey (The Irony of It All, 1893-1919, LJ 10/15/86; The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941, Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1991), this work successfully stands alone as a detailed and perceptive analysis of two decades of American life. Marty's subject is neither theology nor private faith but rather religion's intersection with mainstream culture. Marty describes Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish unity first in opposition to Hitler and then in resistance to the forces of "godless Communism." He also discusses the currents of separatism and exclusion from "one nation under God." There is no richer source available than this clearly written study, and it is equally valuable for scholars, students, and lay readers. Essential for collections in American religion or cultural history.‘Wendy Knickerbocker, Rhode Island Coll. Lib., Providence

In the first volume of his projected four-volume history of American religion (The Irony of It All), Marty, the dean of American church historians, demonstrated that American religion in the period between 1893 and 1919 could be best characterized by the struggles between the progressive impulses of modernists and the conservative impulses of countermodernists. In his second volume, The Noise of Conflict, Marty indicated the ways that this earlier struggle provides the foundation for the unity that many American religious groups strove to establish between the wars. Here, in this third volume of his magisterial history, Marty explores the ways in which this impulse toward unity provided the foundation for a variety of American religious and cultural identities from the beginning of WWII through 1960. With his characteristic grace and wit, Marty reveals that just below the unity and harmony marking so many religious groups during this period lay the forces of dissent and division. Yet, Marty's study is as much cultural history as religious history, and the great value of his work lies in his exposition of the intersection of cultural forms and religious meaning. (Aug.)