Joe
Excellent one-volume, engaging history on the Texas Revolution. Great for high school or college syllabus for a course on Texas history.
Terrifying three-quarters, the ending diffused. I thought the utter majesty of the book was its geographical description of the intermountain west. Adequate companion through Covid.
Reduces Lutheran life and mission in the U.S. as a prelude to the late 20th Century's institutional urge to merge. Paradoxically parochial.
Had no idea Armenian-Americans held such a rich response to tragedy. Staring into something hopeless and walking through it without lardering over it with boosterish “hope,” politics, or sentiment. More a sense of compulsory momentum, tragically persisted within.
The title story merits a second read after you’ve been startled. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8” felt contemporary for the meeting of disembodied voices and their eventual loss.
it’s difficult for outsiders to grasp just how pioneering McPherson was in early 20th Century American Christianity, making her mark in Pentecostalism’s urban institutional expansion, mass broadcasting, megachurching, formal leadership by women, and denominationalism. Blumhofer paints a scholarly study enlivened with McPherson’s antics like riding her motorcycle down the main aisle of her church and up to her pulpit.
The first mainstream history of “Pentecostalism” to connect it with the experiential holiness tradition that went before it, stretching well back to the First Great Awakening. Solid broad history for an initial encounter with the field.
Soul-boxing diary of the loneliness and suffering of a pioneering missionary to native tribes in New England. An early American Cost of Discipleship.
Forget the head-pats from academia. Lord, would that I could write “popular” history like Tuchman. Her chapter on anarchism provided a toehold into its explosive desperation outside of accounts more commonly marked by fetishized violence or ideological dissection.
Despite the title, Wuthnow is writing a sociologically-informed history of the interaction between religion and public life in Kansas. It rebuts the Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas by showing how religion largely served as a pragmatic, centrist framework knitting local communal life together.
However, in each case - slavery, populism, prohibition, evolution, and abortion - Kansas has served as a stage upon which national movements descended to act out an moral drama, sparking a blaze from plenty of dry local tinder. Geographically and politically, Kansas has served as a sort of American center stage.
Social-political movements in Kansas succeeded only to the extent they adopted a grammar of reaction to national forces hostile to its own religious values.
Vivid and fairly-told. I walked in disparaging, walked out respectful. Tied well to the Oklahoma region and its history, tying it into the charismatic movement in that place. The prosperity gospel is toxic, but Roberts is genuine. Looking forward to reading future research on the tie between Roberts’ mid-20C prosperity gospel and the emergence of the Word-Faith movement.
A long, tiresome slog through the potatoes who are the effective protagonist of the book.
The topic is ambitious and the revolution’s early intellectuals generated enough material to entice any historian into a bog of trivia. Figes tells the story with both alluring passion and magisterial grasp. By the end, you gain a sense that Dostoyevsky merits a back seat to Lenin in authoring a profound Russian tragedy.
Ambitious synthesis of current apologetics which poses the challenge "From reason and communal ethics alone, is it wicked for postmodern Americans not to believe in God?"
Half the hand-wringing about the book’s totalized society evaporates when one reads it alongside the acid trip of Moon Is A Strange Mistress. Like the Beatles, the wonder is that the same middle of the 20th Century could hold such a centrifuge within itself.
Snow Crash didn’t clock in with the interest and weight of Gibson’s Neuromancer (unfair, yes), but you can see the larval stages of Stephenson’s ability to take delight in humans in contest with each other.
Fascinating as historiography. Tenured at BYU, the author (Ph.D, Univ of Wisconsin) evinces meticulously-footnoted skill at taking a secular “Mormon Studies” approach toward thematic threads of anti-Mormon reaction.
He describes the movement with studied evenhandedness until his chapter on its politics. At Nauvoo, Smith acts only defensively, and the catastrophe is triggered by internal dissent over the polygamy revelation. Generalizations warranting multiple citations in earlier chapters are simply claimed. Smith appears politically unagentic, the author omitting, for instance, mention of his candidacy for the U.S. presidency or his contested rhetoric in securing the settlement’s municipal charter from Illinois. The book is not an apologia or a hagiography of mormonism, but an academic contribution from a historian well aware of the world beyond it.
it is telling that its weakest portion lies in the failure to enter into critical reckoning with Smith himself and in the political claims he made as the singular voice of his religion.
As a card-carrying member of Noll’s Books and Culture target audience, I was disappointed that the book’s magisterial yearning robbed it of the gritty populism and passion illustrating its subject matter. It’s a fine enough textbook, if that would satisfy your aspirations as a reader.
The first book in the series is the most human, which entices you forward into the other two books which feature demanding physics concepts as their main characters. Enjoy this book and buckle up to learn in the next two.
Contains spoilers
The key to appreciating this work is to travel alongside as Neddy. Your ability to come alongside him lets you walk right up to the conclusion, without an explanation. Then you can deduce what threads form the story add to that explanatory vacuum.
Read the summer before moving to Texas for college, enshrouded with a sense of the epic journey and with much naivety.
Fascinating extension of the thesis that memory of the past is necessary for advancement in the future. It could have benefitted from work with a good editor to compact the story into a smaller isotope.
Contains spoilers
Inside of you are two wolves, a white one and black one. Or are there?
Untethered from external guidance, the world after the enlightenment spins its wheels but fails to gain any moral traction. Its reasoning is solipsistic and more about soothing the self rather than exercising it to grow in virtue. MacIntyre performs a surgical dissection that opens up this world, unveiling just how little is there.