Prayer Is A Place - America's Religious Landscape Observed

Zusatztext Advance Praise for Prayer Is a Place “I can think of no better guide through the changing religious landscape—“messy and highly flammable”—than Phyllis Tickle . . . . She manages to make her description of the raucous parade of contemporary American religion into a journey of gracious personal freedom where mercy and inclusion push the reader into prayer and amazement. This book is a wake-up call to embrace a generous view of religion and! above all! it provides a much needed antidote to religion’s exclusive and violent manifestations.” —Alan Jones! Dean of Grace Cathedral San Francisco Author of Reimagining Christianity Informationen zum Autor PHYLLIS TICKLE was! until recently! religion editor and editor at large at Publishers Weekly ! the leading trade publication in the publishing industry. The author of more than two dozen books! including The Shaping of a Life! The Divine Hours! Eastertide! and Christmastide ! she lives on The Farm In Lucy! near Memphis! Tennessee. Klappentext A leading authority on religion and spirituality in America! Tickle has been a key figure in bringing discussions about religion into the nation's cultural and intellectual mainstream. This is her first-person account of the people she's met and the trends she has observed over the last 12 years. Chapter 1 All stories, even “Once upon a decade” ones, must continue with “and in a certain place” if they are to tell themselves completely. For this story, the place is Lucy, Tennessee . . . Lucy, where all things begin now and where, pray God, they will also arrive someday at their natural ending. Lucy, when Sam and I brought our children here in 1977, was a clapboard, cinder-block, and tin-roofed village of no more than two dozen houses. It was surrounded by sparsely populated farmland and possessed of one aging general store, one magnificent old county school larger than the township, a railroad track with a spur, a Baptist church, a United Methodist church, two A.M.E. churches, and--incongruous as it may seem at first blush--a genuinely Anglican one. The school was testimony to the stature that Lucy once had enjoyed; the railroad with its spur was the explanation behind that stature. Lucy had once been a bustling railroad stop for passengers and cargo on their way south and west toward Memphis. The general store had been both way station and cafe, while the village’s shade trees had functioned like oases in the midst of the desiccating heat of West Tennessee summers. But as with much of rural America, the coming of affordable cars, then of good roads, and finally of huge trucks had obviated the railroad and, thereby, the town, long before our arrival. When Sam and I first moved to Lucy, we and such neighbors as we then had used to quip that Lucy was only twenty miles but over a hundred years removed from Memphis. The twenty miles have held constant since 1977, but the number of years has shrunk considerably. We old-timers are forced now to admit--with unstinting regret--that we live only about thirty years away from the city these days. We still operate off septic tanks, in other words, but by order of the Shelby County Health Department we all had to have our wells closed off and cemented up a few years ago, lest our use of them somehow contaminate Memphis’s aquifers. We still keep coal-oil lamps--or at least the Tickles do--handily placed about, though we lose power no more than twice or three times a year now. There is no television cable strung in to us and there are few fancy telephone wires, but satellites and cell phones have more or less obviated them as well. The old general store withered first into shut-down gas pumps and then into only a few shelves of staples before it finally closed; but it has been replaced by a thriving operation where the older men still gath...

Product details

• Authors: Phyllis Tickle
• Publisher: Dell Publishing Inc.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 21.06.2005
• EAN: 9780385504409
• ISBN: 978-0-385-50440-9
• No. of pages: 331
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 241 mm x 32 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories