Title: Growing up religious : Christians and Jews and their journeys of faith /
Authors: Wuthnow, Robert.
Publisher: Beacon Press,
Year: 1999
Subjects: Religious biography United States.; Christians United States; Jews United States Biography.; Christian biography United States; Jewish way of life; United States Religious life and customs Case studies.; Christian life United States.
Abstract: How do Christian and Jewish Americans recall their religious upbringing and how does it affect their adult lives? Growing Up Religious offers a portrait of how Americans think about, reflect on, recapture, and reproduce the religious experiences of their childhoods. Exploring personal stories gathered in interviews with more than two hundred people from a variety of ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, Robert Wuthnow discovers that what brings adults back to religious life often has less to do with religious institutions than with the way family and other relations formed around religious practice: memories of mothers, fathers, and neighbors whose everyday acts were imbued with religious meaning. We read about people like Bruce Gallahue, whose relationship to religion changed as he went from growing up in a mainline Protestant home, where his image of God was based on fear and strict rules, to an adult struggle as a recovering alcoholic, when he was able to receive comfort by returning to Protestantism with a new vision of God as compassionate and forgiving.
Contents: Part I: the sacred at home -- Family rituals -- Home for the holidays -- Generation in the spirit -- Part II: Going to services -- Houses of worship -- The Ties that bind -- Learning to be a leader -- Part III: moving away -- Points of departure -- Remembering the past -- The Move to spiritual practice -- Part IV: E Pluribus Unum? -- Bridging diversity -- Seeing with four eyes.