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Zusatztext There are many things to recommend about this book, but perhaps the most valuable aspect is the way it makes coherent and usable the debate over religion in American life. ...The editors have done an admirable job sustaining that easy intellectual flow in their relevant and scholarly book. Klappentext Prophesies of Godlessness explores the surprisingly similar expectations of religious and moral change voiced by major American thinkers from the time of the Puritans to today. These predictions of "godlessness" in American societysometimes by those favoring the foreseen future, sometimes by those fearing ithave a history as old as America, and indeed seem crucially intertwined with it. This book shows that there have been and continue to be patterns to these prophesies. They determine how some people perceive and analyze America's prospective moral and religious future, how they express themselves, and powerfully affect how others hear them. While these patterns have taken a sinuous and at times subterranean route to the present, when we think about the future of America we are thinking about that future largely with terms and expectations first laid out by past generations, some stemming back before the very foundations of the United States. Even contemporary atheists and those who predict optimistic techno-utopias rely on scripts that are deeply rooted in the American past. This book excavates the history of these prophesies. Each chapter attends to a particular era, and each is organized around a focal individual, a community of thought, and changing conceptions of secularization. Each chapter also discusses how such predictions are part of all thought about "the good society," and how such thinking structures our apprehension of the present, forming a feedback loop of sorts. Extending from the role of prophesies in Thomas Jeffersons thought, to the Civil War, through progressivism, the Scopes Trial, the Cold War and beyond, Prophesies of Godlessness demonstrates that expectations about America's future character and piety are not an accidental feature of American thought, but have been, and continue to be, absolutely essential to the meaning of the nation itself. Zusammenfassung Prophesies of Godlessness explains patterns in how Americans, from the Puritans to the present, have imagined and disseminated prophesies for and against "godlessness." The book identifies and analyzes surprising continuities among those prophesies throughout American history and among thinkers of surprisingly diverse political and religious views. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction - Christopher McKnight Nichols and Charles Mathewes 1: Puritans and Revolution: Remembering the Origin: Religion and Social Critique in Early New England - Wilson N. Brissett (PhD Candidate UVA) 2: The Early Republic: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophy of History and the Future of American Christianity - Johann Neem (Western Washington University) 3: The Romantic Era: Emerson's Churches of One - Matthew Mutter (PhD Candidate, Yale) 4: The Civil War: Redeemer President and Warrior Prophet: Abraham Lincoln, William T. Sherman, and Evangelical Christianity - Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh (US Naval Academy) 5: After the Civil War: Auguste Comte's Theory of History Crosses the Atlantic - Andrew Witmer (PhD Candidate UVA) 6: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Mastery, Modern Doubt, and the Costs of Progress - Christopher McKnight Nichols 7: World War I and After: Godlessness and the Scopes Trial - Kevin M. Schultz (IASC) 8: The Thirties to the Fifties: Totalitarianism and the Second American Enlightenment - David Ciepley (UVA) 9: The Sixties: Secularization and the Prophecies of Freedom - Slavica Jakeli? (UVA) 10: The Seventies and Eighties: A Reversal of Fortunes - Joseph E. Davis (UVA) and David Franz (PhD Candidate UVA) 11: From 11/9 to 9/11 and Beyond: The Return of Jeremiad a...
