In the years following World War II, American Protestantism experienced tremendous growth, but conventional wisdom holds that midcentury Protestants practiced an optimistic, progressive, complacent, ...and materialist faith. InOriginal Sin and Everyday Protestants, historian Andrew Finstuen argues against this prevailing view, showing that theological issues in general--and the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin in particular--became newly important to both the culture at large and to a generation of American Protestants during a postwar "age of anxiety" as the Cold War took root.Finstuen focuses on three giants of Protestant thought--Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich--men who were among the era's best known public figures. He argues that each thinker's strong commitment to the doctrine of original sin was a powerful element of the broad public influence that they enjoyed. Drawing on extensive correspondence from everyday Protestants, the book captures the voices of the people in the pews, revealing that the ordinary, rank-and-file Protestants were indeed thinking about Christian doctrine and especially about "good" and "evil" in human nature. Finstuen concludes that the theological concerns of ordinary American Christians were generally more complicated and serious than is commonly assumed, correcting the view that postwar American culture was becoming more and more secular from the late 1940s through the 1950s.
According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity and ...has been used to legitimate the subordination of wives and daughters. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. The book delineates how such Satanic feminism is expressed in a number of nineteenth-century esoteric works, literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets and journals, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artefacts of consumer culture such as jewellery. The analysis focuses on interfaces between esotericism, literature, art, and the political realm. New light is thus shed on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking. The scope of the study makes it valuable not only for historians of religion but also for those with a general interest in cultural history (or specific aspects of it like gender history, romanticism, or decadent-symbolist art and literature).
Billy Graham Finstuen, Andrew; Wacker, Grant; Wills, Anne Blue
07/2017
eBook
For more than six decades, Billy Graham played a prominent role in shaping Americans’ outlook on the critical religious, political, and cultural issues of the day. By drawing on new sources and by ...asking new questions of old sources, Billy Graham: American Pilgrim offers groundbreaking accounts of Graham’s storied career. The distinguished contributors offer fresh perspectives on the major changes Graham brought to American Christianity, World Christianity, church and state, the Cold War, race relations, American manhood and family, intellectual life, religious media, Christian relief work, and Christian music. Charting his titanic career provides a many-paned window for viewing the history and character of our present and recent past while also attending to Graham’s personal evolution and complexity on these issues. Yet Graham stayed true to evangelical precepts, as he addressed contemporary questions of religion, politics, and culture, as well as perennial questions of spiritual and daily life, that stretched his tradition to its limits. The volume presents this interplay of change and continuity in the life of Graham as a pilgrimage. But Graham lived his journey on an international stage, influencing the world around him in ways large and small—ways that still echo in today’s religious, political, and cultural arenas.
THE HISTORIAN AS PRIEST Finstuen, Andrew S
Fides et historia,
07/2005, Letnik:
37/38, Številka:
2/1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...most importantly, I want to suggest how this sensibility allows the priestly historian to become not only a student mentor but also a student confessor. Most college campuses are well equipped ...with counseling departments to handle the pathological. Yet in a climate where conversations about purpose and meaning take place and where purposes and meanings are often destroyed, can historians expect anything less than student confession? ...the priestly historian has a particular responsibility to entertain confession. Doubt, depression, uncertainty, and fear assault graduate students, contributing mightily to these feelings during their programs of study.
A crisis of authority defines modernity. The crisis in the Christian West dates to the Reformation and the church-and-state conflicts based upon the question: whose Christianity? The crisis deepened ...during the Enlightenment as advances in science, reason, and technology changed the question: Christianity or not? By the 1960s, post-structuralism or postmodernity had posed the very question of authority and asserted competing authorities.
From 1945 to 1965, Americans experienced a time of immense promise and equally immense peril, one that inspired W. H. Auden’s 1947 poem “The Age of Anxiety.” Social and cultural commentators quickly ...adopted Auden’s phrase to describe the postwar mood, making “anxiety” the buzzword of the era.¹ Leonard Bernstein, for example, read Auden’s poem in the summer of 1947 and composed a symphony to capture the feelings of anxiety pulsing through the culture. At the heart of the composition, Bernstein wrote, was “the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith.”²
Contrary to the self-satisfied, placid image of the
In March 1961, the valedictorian of Andalusia High School in Andalusia, Alabama, wrote Reinhold Niebuhr for advice on her upcoming commencement speech. With his customary generosity and humility, ...Niebuhr replied that he was honored by her request for help with her speech. He demurred, writing, “I doubt if one can give any guidance which has not been given by now.” But he continued and suggested a topic: “I can only say we live in an era which has great promise and great peril.”¹
That a young girl from a small town in Alabama appealed to Niebuhr for guidance demonstrates the
In the summer of 1950, Billy Graham received a wedding band in the mail. A man who identified himself only as a veteran of World War II had enclosed the ring as a “symbol of my broken marriage.” In ...his letter, this former soldier explained that he had attended Graham’s crusade in Boston earlier that year and had responded to the evangelist’s call to accept Christ into his life. He had done so, he reported, in “an effort to save my marriage of 5 years,” confessing he was “deep in sin.” He asked Graham to hold the ring in trust
In 1964, Paul Tillich received an exceptionally moving letter from a World War II veteran who had recently read “You Are Accepted,” Tillich’s most famous sermon.¹ In his two-page typewritten letter, ...this former airman reported that just a few days before reading the sermon, he had crumpled under the “weight of guilt and shame and embarrassment” that arose from his memory of “the forgotten graves of the past.” The graves, he revealed, were those of the victims of the saturation firebombings of Japan in 1945. For twenty years, this veteran had carried the burden of his participation in those air
A Curious Trinity Finstuen, Andrew S
Original Sin and Everyday Protestants,
12/2009
Book Chapter
Despite their shared leadership of postwar Protestantism, Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich had little in common on a personal or intellectual level. Separated by age, geography, and theological ...disposition, these men came from and operated in quite different worlds. Niebuhr, the prophet, led the American neo-orthodox movement; Graham, the evangelist, stood at the helm of neo-evangelicalism; and Tillich, the theologian, reinvigorated American Christian thought with his Continental theology. Consequently, they spoke in different accents to very different constituencies of Protestants.¹
In spite of these disparities, Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich shared a common theological principle: behind every sinful act was the indisputable,
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