Here are a few things online that caught my attention this week:
Alec Baldwin interviews David Letterman
Robert Darnton rides off into the sunset
Jeremy Adelman reviews three new books on the history of capitalism
New churches in public schools
Michael Kazin reviews Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
What is Joseph Ellis reading?
Mark Bauerlein and Dana Gioia discuss the Catholic writer in America
Johan Neem on Mark Bauerlein’s “What’s the Point of the Professor“
Lauren Winner reviews Lisa Wilson, A History of Stepfamilies in Early America
Robert Putman talks about Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Nicholas Lemann reviews the book here.
The 40th anniversary “Born to Run” poster is here.
2015-2016 OAH Distinguished Lecturers
Wilfred McClay makes a case for the liberal arts
Chris Gehrz break down the Pew Religious Landscape Study
Balancing old books and new books in the classroom
Thx for the pleasantly surprising Kazin review of the contentiously-titled “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.”
Despite the argument Kruse makes beginning with his subtitle, “corporate America” played no significant role in conceiving any of these initiatives — although the hotelier J. Willard Marriott did persuade fellow businessmen to finance Honor America Day. Devout lawmakers like Dirksen and preachers like Graham were quite capable of mustering a God-fearing constituency by themselves. And Graham was not the stalwart right-winger that Kruse, echoing many of his contemporary critics, describes. As Grant Wacker reveals in his excellent new biography of the man, “America’s pastor” admired and was as close to President Lyndon Johnson, an archliberal, as he was to the wily Republican who succeeded him.
Kruse tells a big and important story about the mingling of religiosity and politics since the 1930s. Still, he oversells his basic premise.
Americans easily accepted placing God’s name on their currency and in the oath children recite every school day because similar invocations were already routine in public discourse — from the Declaration’s reference to the “unalienable Rights” endowed by the “Creator” to the official chaplains who have opened sessions of the House and Senate with a prayer since 1789. Following the attacks of 9/11, we’ve added the ubiquitous “God Bless America” to bumper stickers, to the ends of political speeches and to many a seventh-inning stretch. As features of what the sociologist Robert Bellah called “civil religion” (a term he borrowed from Rousseau), the familiarity of these practices comforts some without making particular demands on anyone else. Even back in the age of Eisenhower, the A.C.L.U. understood that.
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