Awash in a Sea of Faith

Awash in a Sea of Faith
Author :
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Total Pages : 380
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0674056019
ISBN-13 : 9780674056015
Rating : 4/5 (015 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Awash in a Sea of Faith by : Jon Butler

Download or read book Awash in a Sea of Faith written by Jon Butler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.

Awash in a Sea of Faith Related Books

Awash in a Sea of Faith
Language: en
Pages: 380
Authors: Jon Butler
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1990 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

GET EBOOK

Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offe
Becoming America
Language: en
Pages: 337
Authors: Jon Butler
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2001-12-28 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

GET EBOOK

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here ar
The Battle for the American Mind
Language: en
Pages: 380
Authors: Carl J. Richard
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2006-08 - Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

GET EBOOK

The Battle for the American Mind brings together religion, politics, economics, science, and literature to present a compelling history of the American people.
God Is Back
Language: en
Pages: 420
Authors: John Micklethwait
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2009-04-02 - Publisher: Penguin

GET EBOOK

A landmark examination of the resurgence of faith around the globe The Editor in Chief of The Economist and its Lexington columnist show how the global rise of
Inventing a Christian America
Language: en
Pages: 311
Authors: Steven K. Green
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-05 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

GET EBOOK

Steven K. Green explores the historical record that supports the popular belief about the nation's religious origins, seeking to explain how the ideas of Americ