Vol. 1: The Irony of it all, 1893-1919; Vol. 2: The Noise of conflict, 1919-1941.

In this second volume of two tracing the history of 20th-century American religion, Martin E. Marty tells the story of how America has survived religious disturbances and culturally prospered from them.

Vol. 1: The Irony of it all, 1893-1919; Vol. 2: The Noise of conflict, 1919-1941.

In this third volume of his acclaimed chronicle of faith in twentieth-century America, Martin E. Marty presents the first authoritative account of American religious culture from the entry of the United States into World War II through the Eisenhower years. Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 is the first book to systematically address religion and the roles it played in shaping the social and political life of mid-century America. A work of exceptional clarity and historical depth, it will interest general readers as well as historians of American and church history. "The series will become a standard account of the nation's variegated religious culture during the current century. The four volumes, the fruition of decades of research, may rank as much honored Marty's most significant contribution to U.S. studies."—Richard N. Ostling, Time "When America needs some advice or commentary on the state of modern theology, the person it turns to is Martin Marty."—Publishers Weekly

In this second volume of two tracing the history of 20th-century American religion, Martin E. Marty tells the story of how America has survived religious disturbances and culturally prospered from them.

Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.