{"title":"Joseph Bottum","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"catholic-awakening-book-joseph-bottum-9780385518819","title":"The Catholic Awakening","description":"\u003cp\u003e  We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light.\u003cbr\u003e    In \u003ci\u003eAn Anxious Age,\u003c\/i\u003e Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the  most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life.\u003cbr\u003e    Updating \u003ci\u003eThe Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism\u003c\/i\u003e, Max Weber's sociological classic, \u003ci\u003eAn Anxious Age\u003c\/i\u003e undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls \"the Poster Children,\" Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life.\u003cbr\u003e    Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, \u003ci\u003eAn Anxious Age\u003c\/i\u003e traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, \u003ci\u003eAn Anxious Age\u003c\/i\u003e ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49748169785617,"sku":"CIN0385518811G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50432064225553,"sku":"CIN0385518811VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0385518811.jpg?v=1750941831"},{"product_id":"christmas-plains-book-joseph-bottum-9780770437657","title":"The Christmas Plains","description":"\u003cb\u003eA well-respected writer and editor's memoir of childhood Christmases set in the sometimes harsh but always captivating landscape of South Dakota.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Wreaths and holly, fruitcakes and mistletoe, ornaments and snowflakes, St. Nick and Scrooge's humbug, Joseph and Mary, a young child in a manger and magi from the East. These words automatically stir up the season of Christmas and invoke memories of family and friends and hope and faith. By turns sweet and comic, sentimental and serious, the former editor of First Things magazine shares his reflections of the mad joys and wild emotions of the season while growing up on the South Dakota plains.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50364120563985,"sku":"CIN0770437656G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53370752270609,"sku":"CIN0770437656VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0770437656.jpg?v=1751328713"},{"product_id":"decline-of-the-novel-book-joseph-bottum-9781587311987","title":"The Decline of the Novel","description":"The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. “For almost three hundred years,” Bottum writes, “the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world—the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.” But now we no longer “read novels the way we used to.”  In a historical tour de force—the kind of sweeping analysis almost lost to contemporary literary criticism—Bottum traces the emergence of the novel from the modern religious crisis of the individual soul and the atomized self. In chapters on such figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Mann, he examines the enormous ambitions once possessed by novels and finds in these older works a rebuke of our current failure of nerve.  “We walk with our heads down,” Bottum writes. “Without a sense of the old goals and reasons––a sense of the good achieved, understood as progress––all that remains are the crimes the culture committed in the past to get where it is now. uncompensated by achievement, unexplained by purpose, these unameliorated sins must now seem overwhelming: the very definition of a failed culture.” In readings of everything from genre fiction to children’s books, Bottum finds a lack of faith in the ability of art to respond to the deep problems of existence. “the decline of the novel’s prestige reflects and confirms a genuine cultural crisis,” he writes.  Linking the novel to its religious origins, Bottum describes the urgent search for meaning in the new conditions of the modern age: “If the natural world is imagined by modernity as empty of purpose, then the hunt for nature’s importance is supernatural, by definition.” the novel became a fundamental device by which culture pursued the supernatural—facilitated by modernity’s confidence in science and cultural progress. Losing that confidence, Bottum says, we lost the purpose of the art: “the novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.”  Told in fast-paced, wide-ranging prose, Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel is a succinct critique of classical and contemporary fiction, providing guidelines for navigating the vast genre. this book is a must-read for those who hunger for grand accounts of literature, students of literary form, critics of contemporary art, and general readers who wish to learn, finally, what we all used to know: the deep moral purpose of reading novels.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50382927757585,"sku":"CIN1587311984G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50764515475729,"sku":"CIN1587311984VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1587311984.jpg?v=1751245040"},{"product_id":"frankincense-gold-and-myrrh-book-joseph-bottum-9781587312441","title":"Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh","description":"For over thirty years, Joseph Bottum has been writing widely acclaimed Christmas essays, columns, short stories, and carols for American magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, St. Augustine’s Press has gathered a selection of these classic pieces—with a vast range across the Christmas spectrum.    There’s the comic: “Tinsel. No one needs tinsel. Even the word is a tinselly kind of word.” There’s the sentimental: “Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden.” There’s the reminiscent: “Christmas was books, and books Christmas, in those days now mostly washed down to the cold sea.” Along the way, there’s the theological, the learned, the mystical, and the musical.   “Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art,” he writes in praise of mad and cluttered holidays. “Christmas will not be defined by our failures to apply its lessons and carols,” he explains about Yuletide poetry. To see these essays and short stories gathered in one place—in a beautiful illustrated edition from St. Augustine’s Press—is to see the whole of the vision that Joseph Bottum has been painting for decades: a picture of Christmas as a thin place in the wall between the natural and the numinous, where a burning grace slips into a cold winter world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51384556323089,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51384557437201,"sku":"NIN9781587312441","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52412129083665,"sku":"CIN1587312441G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1587312441.jpg?v=1750863163"},{"product_id":"pius-war-book-joseph-bottum-9780739145647","title":"The Pius War","description":"In the brutal fight that has raged in recent years over the reputation of Pope Pius XII—leader of the Catholic Church during World War II, the Holocaust, and the early years of the Cold War—the task of defending the Pope has fallen primarily to reviewers. These reviewers formulated a brilliant response to the attack on Pius, but their work was scattered in various newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals—making it nearly impossible for the average reader to gauge the results. In The Pius War, Weekly Standard's Joseph Bottum has joined with Rabbi David G. Dalin to gather a representative and powerful sample of these reviews, deliberately chosen from a wide range of publications. Together with a team of professors, historians, and other experts, the reviewers conclusively investigate the claims attacking Pius XII. The Pius War, and a detailed annotated bibliography that follows, will prove to be a definitive tool for scholars and students—destined to become a major resource for anyone interested in questions of Catholicism, the Holocaust, and World War II.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52121458475281,"sku":"NLS9780739145647","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780739145647.jpg?v=1759401018"},{"product_id":"pius-war-book-joseph-bottum-9780739109069","title":"The Pius War","description":"In The Pius War, Weekly Standard's Joseph Bottum has joined with rabbi David G. 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Turning to the events of 1776, Bottum ties South Dakota to the streams of thought, belief, and practice welling at the country’s founding to form “a swelling moment, a time that history starts to flood,” one that would eventually extend to the prairies and plains of South Dakota, “where liberty found a place.” Jeanne Bowman contributes beautiful woodcut-style illustrations to accompany Bottum's poetry.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53263072854289,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53263072887057,"sku":"NIN9781941813683","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}]}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/author-books-by-joseph-bottum.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}