{"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":3.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50432064225553,"sku":"CIN0385518811VG","price":4.58,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0385518811.jpg?v=1750941831","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/catholic-awakening-book-joseph-bottum-9780385518819","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}