History of American Religion, 1865 to Present will consider the varieties of American religious experience while keeping in mind the importance of pluralism in the U.S. context.
Guess I will get the ball rolling with a little criticism of Chapter 2. Allitt makes a very clear and interesting point in explaining that Catholicism made major progress in respectability during the 1950s in large part because of the Catholic church’s long-held, fervent and from-the-heart anti-Communism. And yet he fails to tie in the [...]
In the introduction, Mark Oppenheimer talks about how religion in the US must compete and so denominations grow and change in different ways than in places with a State Church (7).
Question 1: Is this observation true?
In chapter 1 on Unitarians and homosexuals, Oppenheimer discusses how a counterculture functions in an already countercultural institution. She concludes [...]
In early 1970, amidst the tumult of societal redefinition and transformation so typical of the era, female Episcopalians launched their struggle to gain admittance to the then all-male, Episcopal priesthood. Author Mark Oppenheimer filters their determined attempt, and eventual success, in gaining ecclesiastical equality through the lens of countercultural feminist activism and identity politics. Oppenheimer [...]
Knocking on Heaven’s Door examines the mainstream religions during the 1960s and the impact that the counterculture had on these belief systems. Mark Oppenheimer undertakes this task as he feels that this topic is not often discussed when referring to the cultural movements that took place in the 1960s. Often the discussion lies [...]
At the risk of being overly autobiographical, I feel that I should lay my cards on the table, so to speak, and say something about my own connections to this week’s subject matter. Though naturally I have no firsthand knowledge of the Catholic “folk Mass” of the ’60s and ’70s, except as much as [...]
Deborah Dash Moore sums up the essence of this chapter by saying, “In the European Theater, Jewish soldiers battled several foes. They fought the enemy, their fellow soldiers’ prejudices, and their own anger at such hateful bias. These outer and inner conflicts blurred together in complex ways [. . .] They were American Jewish soldiers [...]
In reading chapters seven and eight of Deborah Dash Moore’s book, is a narrative focused on extraordinary and vivid accounts of American Jewish soldiers military service and personal experiences in Europe, particularly France, during WW II, and their return to
America after the War. The individual stories spotlighted in chapter seven are thought-provoking and challenging both [...]
In Chapter 4 Moore gets into the actual disembarkment, as the representative individuals headed out for the war in their assigned theaters. In describing their feelings, Moore illustrates some of the differences in heading East versus West. Jewish soldiers in the Pacific, where fewer troops overall were headed, and where the issue of anti-Semitism was [...]
Chapter 2 of Deborah Dash Moore’s book, GI Jews, is devoted to the lengths that Jews would go to in proving that they were fit for combat and ready to fight as Jewish-Americans. She describes the Jewish stereotypes of the time- that they were weak and weren’t good fighters, and how this could drive many Jewush [...]
In her book GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, Deborah Dash Moore shows how the war and military service accelerated the assimilation of Jews into American society. The military service forced Jews out of their religious and cultural isolation, and to redefine themselves as both Jews and Americans. But this was not [...]