Christian Critics
Subtitle: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: April 27, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780801434730
Subjects: Christian social thought & activity; Social history; Social Science; Church And Society; Religion - Christian Life; Sociology; USA; Christian Life - Social Issues; Sociology of Religion; 20th century; Church history; United States
First sentence: "Another great change is at hand," wrote the architect and social critic Ralph Adams Cram near the end of World War I.
Description: "Over the course of the twentieth century, liberal Christian intellectuals - both Protestant and Catholic - drew on religion to make sense of the emerging world of professional expertise, industrial technology, and therapeutic selfhood. Christian Critics explores their social thought and cultural criticism and examines the ways that these Christian leaders perceived the nation and its people.".

"Offering portraits of a diverse selection of critics - including Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Dorothy Day, Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Michael Novak, Mary Daly, and Garry Wills - Eugene McCarraher argues that together they left a contradictory legacy.

While all supported movements for the rights of labor, racial minorities, and women, some endorsed the military-industrial order that established the professional-managerial class as a dominant national force, while others favored a decentralized political economy of worker self-management. At the same time, McCarraher recasts the debate about the "therapeutic ethic" by tracing a shift, not from religion to therapy, but from religious to secular conceptions of selfhood.

His book returns theology to its crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American intellectual life and suggests its importance to the future of the American Left."--BOOK JACKET.