This groundbreaking study explores the ways young Americans today understand right and wrong, how they think out their morality, and how they live it out. It describes contrasting ethical styles in the biblical, utilitarian, and personalist traditions of our culture; first, as they structured the conflict between mainstream and counterculture during the 1960s, and second, as they have shaped the transformation of these values in new religious movements since the early 1970s. Coupling descriptive ethics with interpretive sociology, this study pursues biography and moral dialogue with sixties youth who participated in a charismatic Christian sect, a Zen Buddhist meditation center, and a human potential organization (est). It shows the significance of these movements for the adherents' changing ideas of their own identity; their relationships, sex roles, courtship, and marriage; and their politics and vision of society. It analyzes the cultural logic and the social location of their ideas, which break down, recombine, and find renewal in the course of conversion.

This groundbreaking study explores the ways young Americans today understand right and wrong, how they think out their morality, and how they live it out. It describes contrasting ethical styles in the biblical, utilitarian, and personalist traditions of our culture; first, as they structured the conflict between mainstream and counterculture during the 1960s, and second, as they have shaped the transformation of these values in new religious movements since the early 1970s. Coupling descriptive ethics with interpretive sociology, this study pursues biography and moral dialogue with sixties youth who participated in a charismatic Christian sect, a Zen Buddhist meditation center, and a human potential organization (est). It shows the significance of these movements for the adherents' changing ideas of their own identity; their relationships, sex roles, courtship, and marriage; and their politics and vision of society. It analyzes the cultural logic and the social location of their ideas, which break down, recombine, and find renewal in the course of conversion.

Originally published in hardcover in 2011.

Mick Jagger. Ken Kesey. Timothy Leary. Allen Ginsberg. Jim Morrison. Neil Young. Abbie Hoffman. Jerry Garcia. Janis Joplin. Grace Slick. Pete Townshend. Ram Dass. Dennis Hopper. Peter Fonda. Jane Fonda. Jerry Rubin. Hippies on Mt. Tam. The March on Washington. Anti-war demonstrations. People's Park. Berkeley. Haight-Ashbury. The Sixties brings together a collection of photographs of the people, events, culture, rock and roll stars, writers, political figures, and other iconic individuals and celebrities who made the sixties the most influential decade of the twentieth century. The Sixties tells the story of that particularly colorful generation with the affection and devotion of someone who has experienced the revolution firsthand. Robert Altman's captivating photographs bring immense power to both quiet, intimate moments and scenes of thunderous anarchy alike.

This paradigm-breaking book dares to rethink the whole of the '60s experience, not from a political or sociological viewpoint but from an historical/theological perspective. Camille Paglia wrote that 'the spiritual history of the sixties has yet to be written.' This is that book. The book's chapters each correspond to a line in Emily Dickinson's poem 'Finding is the first act.' The parallel to Dickinson's experience in the psychic wilderness demonstrates just how much the experience of the '60s was part of an ongoing American story not an aberration. Though it seems contradictory, this book argues for an appreciation of the three '60s: 1960s, 1860s, 1660s, each a chapter of the religious core of the American story.

Each essay in this volume sheds light on an important aspect of the decade&—actually a decade and half&—known as the Sixties. The Sixties are famous for the diverse social movements that threatened the essence of American public policy and mainstream society and changed those very entities in fundamental ways. These essays juxtapose the dramatic narratives of social movements, including civil rights, women's liberation, and antiwar protest, and the Cold War liberalism that spawned them. The contributors are two political scientists, several historians influenced by the social sciences, and the senior staff attorney for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. Contributors are Brian Balogh, Hugh He&člo, Martha Derthick, Daryl Michael Scott, W. J. Rorabaugh, Martha F. Davis, and Louis Galambos.