In the course of a lifetime
Subtitle: tracing religious belief, practice, and change
By: Michele Dillon and Paul Wink.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: Berkeley, CA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 282
ISBN-13: 9780520249011
Description: "In the Course of a Lifetime provides an unprecedented portrait of the dynamic role religion plays in the everyday experiences of Americans over the course of their lives. The book draws from a unique sixty-year-long study of close to two hundred Protestant and Catholic men and women who were born in the 1920s and interviewed in adolescence, and again in the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, and late 1990s. Woven throughout with rich and intimate life stories, the book presents and analyzes a wide range of data from this study on the participants' religious and spiritual journeys. Michele Dillon and Paul Wink explore how such factors as early life experiences, personality traits, marriage and parenthood, mid-life, retirement, and adversity influenced the participants' religious engagement. In turn, they ask how religion and spirituality relate to well-being, community participation, political attitudes, health, depression, life satisfaction, and the fear of death. A testament to the vibrancy of religion in the United States, In the Course of a Lifetime provides an illuminating and sometimes surprising perspective on how individual lives have intersected with cultural change throughout the decades of the twentieth-century"--Publisher description.