An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of by Joseph Bottum

we are living in a profoundly non secular age--but in a truly unusual method, varied from another second of our background. large swaths of yankee tradition are pushed through manic religious nervousness and constant supernatural fear. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, including politicians, artists, environmentalists, fans of nutrients fads, and the chattering sessions of tv commentators: the United States is stuffed with humans frantically looking affirmation in their personal crucial goodness. we're a kingdom eager to stand at the facet of morality--to understand that we're righteous and reside within the light.

Or so Joseph Bottum argues in An fearful Age, an account of recent the USA as a morality story, shaped via its non secular disturbances. And the reason, he claims, is the main major and least spotted historic truth of the final fifty years: the cave in of the Mainline Protestant church buildings that have been the resource of social consensus and cultural solidarity. Our risky religious anxieties, damaged free from the church buildings that after contained them, now madden
everything in American life.

Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological vintage, An nervous Age undertakes case reports in modern social classification, adrift in a state with out the non secular understandings that gave it that means. the college-educated elite he calls "The Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the previous Mainline Protestant domination of tradition: dutiful descendants who declare the excessive social place in their Christian ancestors even whereas they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to "The Swallows of Capistrano," the Catholics shaped through the hold forth of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the try to replacement Catholicism for the loss of life Mainline voice in public life.

Sweeping throughout American highbrow and cultural heritage, An apprehensive Age lines the process nationwide faith and warns in regards to the unusual angels or even stranger demons with which we now strive against. Insightful and contrarian, clever and unforeseen, An frightened Age ranks one of the nice sleek money owed of yank culture.

Praise for Joseph Bottum and An worried Age:

 "An worried Age is certain to be seen as a vintage of yank sociology--not simply due to its titanic wisdom of ancient evidence and personalities, its intensity and a number of layers of that means, but additionally as a result of its literary beauty and resourceful constitution. Bottum bargains a totally new approach of knowing faith in public lifestyles at the present time. the mystical trick Bottum works whilst he asks 'Where did the Protestant ethic go?' is sort of breathtaking." --Michael Novak

"A poet and critic and essayist with a sideline in heritage and philosophy," Joseph Bottum is trying "to wrench the genuine complexity of religion again from the complexity-destroying context of latest political debates." --New York Times

"Joseph Bottum is the poetic voice of contemporary Catholic highbrow lifestyles. His paintings . . . formed the minds of a generation." --National Review

"One of America's such a lot proficient writers, with an ideal ear and a matchless style." --Andrew Ferguson

"A fierce serious intelligence and an excellent feel of the comedy of mistakes we name the human condition." --Paul Mariani