CHARTING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPES

...The cumulative effect of these surveys is to persuade the reader that something indeed is happening in our society that cannot simply be written off as variations on the ageless rites of passage...

...But his interest, like that of the historical geographer, is as much the modes of perceiving this landscape as with the religious configurations themselves...

...nineteenth century history concentrates on institutional or organizational characteristics among competing denominations in an officially pluralist society...

...Exotic as some of the beliefs and practices are, the authors observe a careful objectivity of tone and judgment, restraints which confer a sometimes unexpected dignity on their subjects...

...As such, this is a book on history and about the writing of history, a sensitive guidebook for the bemused observer of the contemporary religious scene as well as a sophisticated exercise in 'historiography for the advanced scholar...

...And perhaps most import, ant, the collective data, however ephemeral individually, reflect a profound division between the needs of literally millions of our youth and the norms and values of middle-class America...

...Anyone at all familiar with the "high cultures" of antiquity--to which, of course, we are also clearly tributary in countless ways--is aware of their radical difference from the world of the Bible...

...BOOKS CHARTING RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPES PAUL R. MESSBARGER A Natiow o f Meh,see~a MARTIN E. MARTY U. o~ Chicago, $8.95 The New R e l | g l o t m Consctmumess EDITED BY CHARLES Y. GLOCK & ROBERT N. BELLAH U. o~ Cali/ornia, $14.95 Some years ago I was introduced to an academic discipline called Historical Geography...

...Marty's own analysis is informed by a fourth kind of mapping, what he calls 'religious social behavior.' A species of social history, employing tools and insights from a variety of disciplines, this method seeks to understand and identify the 'content' of religious faith at the level of group experience, a level only partially illuminated by articulated beliefs and by organizational structure...

...And here Marty is most helpful and persuasive...

...Martin Marty's A Nation o/ Behavers, a study of changes in AmerCommonweal...

...Both of these books argue that we not only have a great deal to learn about that feverish decade, but that R has left a permanent mark on the religious character of this society...

...A classic example is the early imaginings of the transMississippi West, growing out of the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of subsistence farmers rather than an accurate understanding of the territory itself, that led to some of the more disastrous limitations of the Homestead Act...

...Of special interest is his account of the importance to his development of the work of Sir James Frazer, Jung and Spengler, the latter of whom ought to be read "as a Romantic and symbolic poet...

...The first essay is much concerned with the university as a special kind of community for humanists, in which teaching and research cannot be separated "even in emphasis," in which the pseudo-scientific analogy is as much a threat to literary studies as the "neo-Nazi slogan of relevance," and in which it is important for the literary scholar to pick "a major writer of literature as a kind of spirit preceptor for himself...

...But the book is more than the surveys and that 'more' is the authenticating element...

...Chapters on the six principal groupings that account for all social manifestations of current religion---on 'mainline' religions, on Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, on Pentecostals and Charismatics, on new or newly-explored religions, on Ethnic and Civil Religions --provide useful tools by which to identify a myriad of phenomena as well as to assess their significance...

...The idea for the book came from a seminar conducted at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley during the 1970-71 school year...

...The Old Testament, contrary to the world about it, refused to canonize culture, the cosmos, time, space, even ideals...

...That essay alone is worth the price of the book, undergirding the entire project with a combination of intellectual depth and moral earnestness that are the hallmarks of prophecy...

...The Glock-Bellah book might well be described as a companion volume to Marty's...

...With the assistance of a research grant and under the direction of Professors Giock and Bellah, the members of the seminar studied nine separate groups whose origins and growth were closely associated with the counter-culture movement of the 1960's...

...The resulting essays are as fascinating as their subjects are various...

...300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor MI 4810~ U.S.A...

...But it is the very condition of fluidity that interests Marty, a protean quality in the environment that is seen not so much as a temporary abnormality as just possibly a permanent condition of ADULT VOCATIONS special proffm for men over twenty-one...

...Thus colonial history emphasizes theological distinctions among religious bodies...

...To a remarkable degree, The New Religious Consciousness undertakes to study the behavior of religious groups almost as though in response to Marty's model...

...And hence much, if not all, of the dynamism, the personalism, the view of history as a means of learning, and the refusal to acquiesce in what is that are some of the better traits of the western tradition...

...The nature of that difference, however, may not have been equally clear, nor to whose advantage it has been...

...Additional chapters assess the effect of the new religions on mainline churches and on the general society...

...Whatever the cause--and Marty offers a modest account of the effects on consciousness of hfe in an industrial and democratic world, the increasing privatizing of efforts to establish personal identity through social locationhand whatever the durability of the condition, this "blurring" of territorial boundaries argues for a different kind of historical analysis...

...347 ican religion during the past dozen years, employs and extends a geographical metaphor, the religious historian as mapmaker...

...If their experience has been particularly broad, if their professional commit3~lyts have brought them into contact with the great monuments of the past and the great men of the present, and if their observations have been enriched by extensive reading, then their reflections can be of interest even to the layman, particularly if their field of specialization happens to be one like art history, which enjoys a considerable popular following...

...Containing some 345 paperbound pages and twentythree plates, at $5.95 this has to be one of the real literary bargains of the year...

...Schneidau is Professor of English at the University of California and his work witnesses to the mastery of his discipline...

...all the observations were conducted in the San Francisco Bay area...

...Another essay offers important historical perspective through a summary of that part of the American past most like the present, the religious awakenings of the nineteenth century...

...As a lifelong midwesterner, I am perhaps least sympathetic with the regional exclusiveness of the study...

...The antipathy, if not the p-~,lement, is sufficiently indicated in his remark about theories of recurrence as he finds them in Nietzche and Yeats: that cyclical images seem "to be central and indispensable to fascist and Nazi views of history...

...One enters this region equipped not only with the tools of the social scientist but also with a disposition to weigh and interpref the covert signals of group identifcation...

...Spiritual heirs of Matthew Arnold, please note...

...But Schneidau has also made himsalf thoroughly conversant wtih mythopoeic thought and biblical scholarship as well as with the associated archeology and anthropology, and it is because of these attainments that he writes with such interest to me...

...In addition, each observer developed independently techniques for getting and interpreting data on the group, the entire research team bound only to the common objectives of the study: "to learn at first hand what it is about various alternative approaches to reality that appeal to youth, what constitutes the alternative states of consciousness they seek to foster, and what the prospects are for these movemerits to have a significant and perma27 May 1977:348 nent place in American culture...

...He has written authoritively on modem German and American architecture...

...However convenient to the control aspects of the survey, I am not persuaded that California is the cradle of future American civilization...

...Marty calls this design 'political', the analysis revealing the effects of the postwar hunger for social identity, the reciprocal legit'unizing of national ethos and religious affafiation through the formation of what was later to be called Civil Religion...

...Marty's own interpretation of his six groupings are, by his own admission, tentative and undernourished, lacking in the extensive and close observation his model requires...

...For the past few years, conventional wisdom has come to view the '60s as an interlude, a brief cultural hiatus that took on an appearance of magnitude and consequentiality far in excess of its real character...

...Risking the objection that events of the past decade are as yet too inchoate to permit an historical ordering, Marly bravely sets out to chart the shifts in the religious landscape, including the altered boundaries of established religious communities as well as fresh eruptions of altogether new forms of religious expression...

...It is more than a pleasure to record that even in the realms of academe and of scholarship the majesty of the English language remains a willing tool for one who has learnt how to use it...

...He is, or has been, "a giant figure in American architecture," as the publisher's press release points out...

...He has presided over eminent departments, colleges, and professional associations...

...What is especially interesting about this field is that in addition to studying the conventional topics of the physical environment-topography, climate, etc.--and interactions with organisms, the historical geographer seeks to know the human perceptions of the environment and the effects of that perception on the use of the land...

...He has inspected stones of aesthetic value from Brasilia and Tokyo to Collegeville, Minnesota...

...But to have defined the territory, to have provided the vocabulary by which to identify the several zones, and to have demonstrated the qualities of mind and imagination necessary to the art of writing history is quite enough for one book...

...This is not your predictable book on "biblical relevance...

...University Mk:rofikns International Dept...

...And for many of those who once identified their hopes for social renewal with the civil rights and anti-war movements, the luxury of a return to even superficial tranquillity neutralizes any feeling of personal betrayal...

...A r c h | t e c t t l r e asul t h e 8meilal Purpose IOHN BURCHARD McGraw-HiU, $25 ERIC ~.OCx~ &NE For some distinguished scholars, retirement can bring notable rewards...

...Such explorations take one into the nexus of meaning and belonging, of belief and behavior, the shadowy region where faith is lived...

...and while no one can safely predict the durability and impact of any one sect beyond the next twenty-four hours, all have progressed beyond the stage of media events, most have evolved an institutional character, and some have "succeeded" to the point of having their features absorbed into the life of the established churches...

...18 Bedford Row London, WC1R 4EJ England Commonweal: 349...

...How, Marly asks, does membership, for example, in a Pentecostal sect manifest itself in everyday living, in attitudes and perceptions, in understanding of self as well as external reality...

...Hence that "sacred "discontent," that creative "alienation" in whose praise Schneidau writes in his first chapter...

...Its larger dimension of interest stems from the fact that it also raises "most of the assumptions around which my work at present revolves...

...Beilah's essay is particularly moving, as he draws on his considerable learning to fashion an interpretation of the principal intellectual and religious currents of the past 300 years, currents converging on the present with a force sufficient to produce permanent alterations in the way we perceive reality...

...Just as a piece of elegant prose this book is a delight to read...

...Among the nine are three divisions marking those inspired by Oriental thought, those inspired by Western religious traditions, and those reflecting secular versions of the counter-culture...

...One learns for example the ritual con, tent of a sunrise service of the Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization, of the appropriation of radical leftist rhetoric by the Christian World Liberation Front, or of the intense concern of the Church of Satan to create a public image acceptable to the larger society...

...After a lifetime of piling up monographs, pouring over texts, preparing lectures, cajoling colleagues, and supervising graduate assistants, they can at last stop to reflect...

...The Hare Krishna may well be marginal to American society, but to return to Marty's metaphor, all represent cracks and fissures in the surface that betoken powerful subterranean upheavals...

...He has met all the famous architects and art historians of his generation...

...He has been honored by academies, foundations, and even governments...

...B e r H i l ! I s Dead...

...n l q t l c e Vawter One of the most exciting books from a university or any other press to cross my desk in recent times is Herbert N. Schneidau's Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition published in 1976 by the University of California Press at Berkeley...

...commonweal Volumes I to 104--1924-1977 is Available in MIC RM For Complete Information WRITE : Oept...

...Frye, incidentally, confesses to being p - ~ l e d with the influence of a "poet" so antipathetic to him in so many ways...

...Better yet, be has been provided with money, Librm-im s: Save Shelf Space...

...In an early chapter on the history of religious history, the author identities three earlier kinds of mapping that correspond not so much to the limits of historical method as to the nature of the religious phenomena themselves...

...Frye considers the second of these two essays to be the keystone of the book...

...Rather, Schneidau challenges western man to recognize how different he is from most other men who have ever lived, and to acknowledge how much this difference is due to the Bible--by which he means, mainly and quite rightly in this case, the Old Testament...

...I would hope that all who read it will find this book as stimulating as I did...

...Over periods as long as two years, each researcher closely studied his/her assigned community, participated in its rituals, read its literature, and interviewed individual members...

...and in the 1950s sociologist Will Herberg designed a third paradigm for understanding the upsurge of religious activity in his influential Protestant, Catholic, Yew...

...And /he final two chapters, the work of the two editors, give a vital philosophical depth to the entire project...

...Certainly John Burchard has all the credentials for membership in this category...

...The epigraph for the book, a line from a Wallace Stevens poem, is the key to Marty's purposes: "We live in the description of the place and not in the place itself...

...Write: ADULT VOCATIONS Dex 41H, Comiinesnveal American religious life...

...This book should aid the clarification...

...Accordingly, the book is persistently reflexive, each successive foray into the wilderness of proliferating religious subcultures accompanied by a sane and richly suggestive epistemological discussion...