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 | Culture and Redemption: |
ADDITIONAL REVIEWS: Culture and Redemption offers a persuasive and much-needed explanation of how secularism has functioned and indeed continues to function in American society. Fessenden proposes that the narrative of secularism maintains such a stronghold on cultural and scholarly imaginaries that Americanists have been at a loss to explain the evangelical presence in politics or an American culture so seemingly bifurcated between religious conservatives and secular liberals."--Sarah Rivett, Religion "Using literature as a window into culture, Fessenden succeeds in provoking and invigorating rethinking of the never simple relationships among religion, race, secularism, and the contours of American Democracy."--Candy Gunther Brown, Church History "A tour de force stretching from colonization to the 1920s, [this book] carefully balances overtly religious material with fictions whose theological valences are often overlooked. [It] is a comprehensive vision of just how deep the roots of US 'civil religion' go, a term coined by Robert Bellah in 1967, but here revealed as the culmination of a long-standing national binary not only between the religious and the secular but more specifically between Protestantism and anti-Protestantism."--Everett Hamner, Literature and Theology "While the primary audience for this book is academic, Fessenden's insights have import for larger cultural discussions of religion's place in American life, a point she reinforces in her introduction, with some brief attention to the 'newly emboldened Christian right,' and in her coda in which she considers the future possibilities for religious dissent and the exportation through our foreign policy of essentially Protestant American values' that attempt 'to ensure religious freedom and eradicate conflict by confining religion to a privatized sphere.' Culture and Redemption is a book of moment, and readers will find Fessenden's treatment of secularism and American literature eye opening."--Jeffrey D. Groves, Journal of Church and State "At a time when scholars, journalists, and the wider public are focusing their attention on the overt political and social 'intrusions' of religious groups into public and private life, Fessenden has unearthed a hidden history of powerful connections, transformations, and syntheses between the religious and the secular. In so doing, she opens a promising and suggestive agenda for American religious and literary scholarship."--W. Clark Gilpin, The Journal of Religion ENDORSEMENTS: "Culture and Redemption is a wonderfully refreshing book about anomalies of power among America's religions and cultures. Tracy Fessenden's expansive and often surprising readings demonstrate that strongly Protestant and broadly religious concerns persistently upended the seemingly natural triumph of secularism in America, with powerful effects on our literature and ethics alike. In short, a fascinating book."--Jon Butler, Yale University "Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption is an important work of scholarship. The book makes a compelling case for seeing particular forms of Protestant religion as an 'unmarked category' in American cultural analysis and urges a rethinking of some major works of American literature in relation to that category. The book is tightly argued, thoroughly researched, and consistently well written."--Lucy Maddox, Georgetown University "This extraordinary, potentially landmark work is thickly textured, intellectually nuanced, and relentlessly insightful. Analyzing Puritan sermons, early school primers, and the nineteenth-century canon, Tracy Fessenden reveals the religious legacies and hidden agendas of American secularism. Her chapter on The Great Gatsby is a tour de force."--Thomas J. Ferraro, Duke University File created: 6/17/2008 | |
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