The American Spiritual Culture
Dean, William
themselves in experience." This is all mild enough. Then what were all those sharp oppositions about in the first place? I can't say what a reader uninitiated in ancient biblical and patristic...
...If Pagels had aimed for something beyond easy (and by now stereotypical) revisionism, she might have shown how in the best realizations of Christianity the most robust spiritualities have not been replaced by but rather have thrived within the framework of the creed and canon...
...No less an exemplar of the pragmatic tradition than William James ended his life in a poignant search for "the only door to the universe's deeper reaches...
...In other words, Dean believes that to be an American one must work through and perhaps even exhaust the social and sacred conventions built into our environment before a genuine encounter with God can occur...
...OUT OF TUNE James T. Fisher he study of the nation's character is a genre of American writing older than the nation itself, tracing its origins as least as far back as Cr6vecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782...
...The first is that despite her own packaging, I really think that in the end Pagels wants to acknowledge the value as well as the limits of tradition...
...Dean assumes that these new Americans view themselves as "displaced persons" in the tradition of European immigrant discourses, but he offers no evidence for this assertion...
...New York Times Book Review 0-8006-3479-9 paperback 296 pp $18.00 (Can...
...I can't say what a reader uninitiated in ancient biblical and patristic lore wilt make of this...
...As a people self-conscious of their own displacement and deeply intimate with violence, he argues, Americans improvised their relationship with a God that worked as a "sacred convention" as well as a "living, historical reality...
...JOHN R. STUMME and ROBERT W. TUTTL CHURCH AND STAT1 Lutheran Perspective: Seven experts probe the meaning of religion ir public life for Christians in the context of a pervasive religious pluralism and a growing secularism...
...Such studies would require something more than the delivery of common knowledge in the breathless whisper of new and personal discovery, would demand the full and fair reporting of the evidence within conceptually clear categories rather than the artful weaving of personal narration and false antinomies, would ask of writer and reader alike an intellectual integrity that demands hard thinking and not just the hard sell...
...Alternatively, she might have used her undoubted knowledge of Gnostic texts to provide a full and responsible report of the sort of Christianity they really represent, or indicate how a community without institution, without canon, and without belief, could have provided an enduring framework for the sort of imagination for which she longs...
...The tradition of national-character studies that The American Spiritual Culture now johls is, in fact, more consistent than the culture itself, an irony all too often missed...
...A similar argument has been made before: most memorably by the late John Owen King in The Iron of Melancholy (1983...
...In the latest renewal of this tradition, theologian William Dean argues that Americans share a common spiritual culture "that is sometimes more vividly expressed through secular activities such as jazz, football, and the movies than through the overtly sacred activities of organized religion...
...America, the Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 (University of Massachusetts Press), among other books...
...Nor is a single piece of music or jazz solo cited, nor is Charlie Parker mentioned, though no one in our national history more truly embodies the spirit of artistic improvisation...
...3HN W. DE GRUCHY (ECONCILIATION ~estoring Justice "A passionate yet carefully reasoned account of the connection between God's gift of reconciliation in Christ and political struggles for justice and peace...
...Many historians will howl in indignation at this latter assertion, pointing to the work of such scholars as Jon Butler, who showed in Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990) that the Visit us on the Web at: commonwealmagazine.org nation's Christian-dominated character was achieved only after decades of struggle against all manner of heterodox and unchurched dissenters...
...James T. Fisher is the author of CommuIlion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America (Oxford) and Dr...
...Paul Tillich fits comfortably here in a treatment of Richard Nixon's dark fascination with football, violence, and evil, just as theologies of displacement and dispossession have much to contribute to our understanding of the Golden Age of Hollywood...
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...We may even soon begin to see new models for studies of the national character...
...Flannery O'Connor's dictum that "tiction can transcend its limits only by staying within them" grounds Dean's treatment of three American "inventions" with deep spiritual significance: jazz, football, and the movies...
...He insists that religion is rarely taken seriously anymore by intellectuals, including professors of religious studies...
...Dean is on much surer footing in his discussions of football and the movies, perhaps because they are so ubiquitous that he can speculate freely without fear of overgeneralization...
...Dean is surely more optimistic than many of his recent predecessors in the genre...
...Dean makes a few passing references to the event but the book was surely conceived and largely written beforehand...
...O'Connor, he suggests, understood perhaps better than anyone else that the Christian writer "has a greater, not a lesser, obligation to write a secular story, portraying the natural world just as it is, honoring its own laws and limits...
...He also believes that "the American spiritual culture need only be revived rather than created de novo, for there is a significant and relatively consistent American symbolic, theological, and philosophical tradition on which it can lean...
...28.95) At bookstores or call 1-800-328-4648 FORTRESS PRESS Augsburg Fortress, Publishers fortresspress.com Commonweal 2 7 May23, 2003...
...Dean contributes some valuable insights and new material to the discussion particularly in his recurring invocation of Flannery O'Connor...
...Luke Timothy Johnson is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology, Emory University...
...It is when this is accomplished that the reader can be opened to a sense of mystery that operates within the natural world...
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...His book The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters is forthcoming from Doubleday...
...It is impossible to read The American Spiritual Culture without reflecting on the implications of 9/11 for both the national character and studies thereof...
...The problem is that--after a perfunctory bow to cultural theories of jazz improvisation and African-American tradition-Dean brings us to Coltrane via a lengthy discourse on the theological implications of debates between Hebraic "improvisers" and Hellenistic "imitators...
...We may well need a new model of immigrant narrative to account for the experience of these people, many of whom are neither Christian nor Jewish...
...Many of these third-world immigrants came to the United States as highly skilled workers and maintain enduring links to their countries of origin...
...Dean undermines his own avowed intentions by trivializing the music...
...Dean's reading of John Sayles's 1996 film Lone Star shows what can happen when a theologian truly engages a cultural text...
...If one wishes to see jazz taken seriously as a foundation of the American spiritual culture, one must write seriously about the art form as musicologists and cultural historians have been doing for decades...
...While this pragmatist's vision of God leads inevitably to atheism, in Dean's view, it is an "ironic" atheism that prompts its own transcendence...
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...His pivCommonweal 26 May 23, 2003 otal chapter on jazz properly culminates in a brief discussion of the great saxophonist John Coltrane, who pressed the limits of improvisation in pursuit of his goal "to live the religious life, and express it in my music....My music is the spiritual expression of what I am--my faith, my knowledge, my being...
...Eusebius, Augustine, Luther, John Dewey, and Paul Tillich all make appearances in this chapter, but Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Duke Ellington are nowhere to be found...
...Dean devotes the first half of The American Spiritual Culture to an elaborate meditation on "God the Opaque...
...The second is that while Christianity is certainly in need of the Spirit these days, it does not need the cultivationof-the-self spirit of narcissism nearly so much as it needs the shakingthefoundations spirit of prophecy...
...He is co-director of the American Catholic Studies program at Fordham...
...This is unfortunate on two counts...
...Yet an equally significant date for this study is 1965 when, as Dean acknowledges, immigration reform legislation resulted (not altogether intentionally) in a massive influx of people from Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the third world...
...I suspect that the packaging will ultimately triumph, and that readers who share Pagels's innate sense that structure is unfor~nate and spirit always good will come away from reading this book with that conviction strengthened...
Vol. 130 • May 2003 • No. 10
