WADE CLARK ROOF
Tracking America's
"Spiritual Ferment"
As a good Southern Methodist might, Wade Clark Roof set out to be a minister, going to Yale to get a divinity degree. But it happened to be the rebellious '60s, a time of intellectual and institutional turmoil, and Roof moved toward the secular, studying sociology instead. Still, you can't take all of the religion out of a South Carolinian. Today Roof is an influential sociologist of religion, ambitiously tracking the demographic wave of baby boomers as it has washed over -- some would say washed away -- the institutions of American religion.
Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, Nov.), Roof's newest look at the influence of that sizable generation on religion, makes a convincing case that boomers have succeeded in redefining religion as we know it. At the beginning of a new millennium, Roof writes, American religion is not so much about institutions anymore as it is a spectrum of eclectic beliefs hybridized to fit individual yearnings. It's not a fad, though it has faddish extremes. Nor is it something that boomers, now in their 40s and 50s, will outgrow. The change, Roof argues, is permanent. "With success, technology, advancement, the Dow-Jones averages, materialism and all the things we've got going for us, here we are hungry, hungry for something deeper. I think this book is a portrait of our time."
Roof returns to many of the same people interviewed and featured in his bestselling 1993 title, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (HarperCollins). Yes, he says, the "Vicki Feinstein" character -- one of five subjects Roof used to illustrate trends and new syntheses of religious belief -- really did ask, in a conversation he reports in Spiritual Marketplace, if Star Trek was a religion. The new book relies on 10 years of interview data and a broad range of contemporary scholarship. "What I tried to do in this book is bring a somewhat greater intellectual grasp to the issues of contemporary spirituality," Roof explains.
Princeton marketing staff plans a nationwide advertising campaign in religion and academic journals. A five-city author tour of California, Oregon and Washington in November is scheduled. Senior publicist Darcy Cohan estimates a total marketing and promotion budget of $20,000 for the book, one of the press's major fall titles. -- Marcia Z. Nelson
ANN TAVES
Explaining Religious
Experiences
Except for six months of services at a Unitarian Church, Ann Taves grew up with absolutely no formal religious practice -- not even on Christmas or Easter, the two times of the year even nonpracticing Christians dare to set foot in church. Yet she grew up intrigued by religion. "Maybe I was curious because it was something other people had that I didn't have," says Taves. "Or maybe it's just an innate fascination for me."
Either way, that fascination compelled her to major in religious studies as an undergraduate at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., where she eventually experienced her own religious conversion. Now a practicing Episcopalian and professor of religion, Taves studies the breadth of American religious experience in all its variety and quirkiness.
In her newest book, Taves tackles an intriguing but often misunderstood type of religious experience: fits, trances, visions, speaking in tongues, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences and possession. Titled Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James, the book is being released in December by Princeton University Press in hardcover and paperback to appeal to both academic and more general audiences.
Taves traces the debate about these religious experiences from the mid-18th to early 20th centuries, focusing especially on the interplay between religion and psychology. Believers have long viewed such experiences as manifestations of God, the spirits or Christ within, while skeptics have understood them as symptoms of physical disease, mental disorder, group dynamics or other natural or social causes. "I see the book as a history of arguments over whether or not God is present in the experiences of individuals and groups or whether God is only someone you read about in the Bible," says Taves. "I try to sympathetically enter into a variety of ways people have interpreted these experiences."
Taves has taught both at the Claremont School of Theology and at the Claremont Graduate University since 1983, after receiving her doctorate in American religious history from the University of Chicago. The author of two previous books -- The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth CenturyAmerica (Notre Dame Press, 1986); and Religious and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbott Bailey (Indiana University Press, 1989) -- Taves says her next book will look at the changes in worship as a result of the liturgical and ecumenical movements of the 20th century. -- Heidi Schlumpf
JAMES MOORHEAD
Apocalypse Someday
What happens to religion when it loses its sense of the impending apocalypse? For mainline Protestants of a century ago, argues Princeton Theological Seminary professor James Moorhead, the loss of millennial urgency meant that theology had failed to meet a basic human need. "We seem to have a need to relate ourselves to an end," says the church historian, whose World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880“1925, is due this month from Indiana University Press.
Most prominent 19th-century Protestants were postmillennialists, meaning that they believed that Jesus would return only after 1000 years of earthly peace and kingdom-building. This is in contrast to more violent (and specific) visions of the last days, such as William Miller's famous 1843 date-setting or more recent eschatological scenarios from The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind fiction series (Tyndale House). Postmillennialists sought improvement everywhere, putting faith in the march of technology and prosperity. Gradually, Moorhead argues, they lost sight of the original millennial vision underlying their activism, but retained the activism itself, as they planted churches, established missions and ministered to the lost. This brand of millennial theology morphed into "a very worldly understanding of the kingdom of God as a never-ending process of improvement," says Moorhead. "The activities became a goal in their own right."
The net result, however, was not what the postmillennialists had once dreamed. Moorhead writes that "it is dangerous... to live without a sense of an End." Although he is reluctant to speculate about whether the 20th-century decline of American Protestantism can be traced to its ambiguous millennial theology or simply a "larger loss of transcendence," he d s consider it myopic for religion to ignore the vital questions of the last things. "This also comes into play with the problem of evil," he observes, claiming that religion needs to address what is "crude and fierce and elemental" in the human experience.
While dozens of scholars have examined premillennialism, Moorhead's is the first full-length study of postmillennial belief and its consequences in nearly 20 years. The timing of its release -- just weeks before the dawn of the third millennium -- is not a coincidence. "There's certainly more interest, more questioning about how people in the past regarded the millennium," says Marilyn Breiter, assistant marketing manager at Indiana University Press. Still, Breiter says, Indiana would have published it with or without the millennium. It is the 28th volume in the press's Religion in North America series.
The press will promote the book at meetings such as AAR/SBL and the American Historical Association meeting in January. Indiana also plans to advertise in academic publications and to target a general, serious-fare audience with an ad in the New York Review of Books. -- Jana Riess
JULE DEJAGER WARD
Feminism, Theology
and Motherhood
When Jule DeJager Ward was a graduate student in search of a dissertation topic at the University of Chicago, her advisor encouraged her to explore the theological underpinnings of an organization she knew well: La Leche League International. As a mother who had nursed all four of her children during the bottle-feeding 1970s, Ward had turned to LLLI for support and understanding, becoming involved on the local, state and national levels.
Years later, however, as she pursued her education in feminist theology, Ward found herself "beginning to outgrow the league." She also realized that no religious studies had ever appeared about the group, which she considered "ripe for theological exploration."
Ward has revised that dissertation into her first book, La Leche League: At the Crossroads of Medicine, Feminism, and Religion, a January 2000 release from University of North Carolina Press. In it, Ward traces the league's origins to seven Catholic mothers in Chicago in the late 1950s. She argues that although the organization itself is secular, its ideology features ideas that were prominent in mid-century Catholicism. In particular, Ward points to "natural law" as a Catholic undercurrent of LLLI, which promotes breast-feeding as an ideal, natural activity for all women.
While some have been quick to dismiss LLLI as anti-feminist because of its strong leanings toward stay-at-home mothers; Ward says that is too simplistic. The league also has a tradition of trusting women's own "practical wisdom" and mothering skills, even against the recommendations of the traditionally male medical establishment. It encourages fathers to become intimately involved in the raising of their children and believes "that women can change the direction of a culture."
In discussing her work, Ward has found that people with some knowledge of parenting invariably relate it to their personal experiences. She hopes this universal connection will give the book a broad audience outside religious studies and the academy. "I've tried to make sure that the press encourages stores to put it into their family section, not just the religion section," Ward says.
To appeal to the crossover markets, UNC Press will advertise in publications such as Commonweal and the Women's Review of Books as well as in scholarly journals. The press is disseminating extra review copies to parenting, health and women's magazines and doing a 2500-print run in paper in addition to the 500 hardcover copies earmarked for library sales.
Elaine Maisner, the UNC Press editor who acquired the book, agrees on its crossover potential. "Women in general will be very interested," she predicts. "Expectant and new parents might pick it up. I think it's really interesting for its examination of religion in practice. The act of how you feed your child can reflect very strong spiritual, moral and religious values, and that's what this book is exploring." -- Jana Riess
