History Faculty Publications

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

10-2013

Publication Source

American Historical Review

Abstract

Laubach’s story—in its emphasis on the spiritual benefits of reading, mysticism, and interfaith encounters— serves as the perfect coda to Hedstrom’s terrific study of religious liberalism in twentieth-century America. The Rise of Liberal Religion joins an expanding corpus of work—most notably Gary Dorrien’s three-volume The Making of American Liberal Theology (2001, 2003, 2006) and Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (2005)—that provides balance to the substantive scholarly attention recently given to conservative Protestantism. This scholarship suggests—and The Rise of Liberal Religion is explicit in this regard—that there is much more to the story of religious liberalism in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America than the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches.

Inclusive pages

1220-1221

ISBN/ISSN

0002-8762

Document Version

Postprint

Comments

The document available for download is the author's accepted manuscript, provided in compliance with the publisher's policy on self-archiving. Permission documentation is on file. To read the version of record, use the provided DOI.

Citation information for the book: Matthew S. Hedstrum. The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012; ISBN: 9780195374490

Publisher

American Historical Association

Volume

118

Issue

4

Link to published version

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