One of my parishioners recently did a major clean out of an old family cottage. Among other things, he and his wife had to weed through hundreds of books and journals. Many of them found their way to the local Goodwill. But one of the journals got passed on to me. It is a copy of the January 1970 volume of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. It passed into my hands not so much as an oddity, but because all the articles in it are focused around a theme near and dear to my heart: the Sixties. In particular, "The Sixties: Radical Change in American Religion."
Contained in the volume are articles about Vatican II, Black consciousness and the Black church, fundamentalism, the growth of interest in Eastern religions, and the growing battle over abortion and contraception. The authors are--at least for those of us schooled in the world of church history--some of the real rock stars of the era: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, James Gustafson, James Cone and Richard John Neuhaus among others. I have not read any of the articles yet. I'm hoping to find the time to sit down and read straight through the 140 pages or so of sixties related materials. I suspect it will be a trip down memory lane, after all, I'm a child of the sixties! But I also suspect I'll be amazed at how little we've moved on some of the issues.
One piece, for instance, discusses the matter of civil religion. I'm convinced we still haven't figured out the appropriate role of religion in the public square, we still don't have what Phyllis Tickle calls a good "theology of religion." And fundamentalism? Well, today most folks think Islam when they hear the word fundamentalist--but truth be told there is still a large contingent of such folks in Christian circles. How does that have bearing on society? One of the articles talks about Jewish-Christian dialogue in the light of the Six-Day War. Now there's a seeming bit of ancient history. Lots has changed in Israel-Palestine since then--yet nothing seems to have changed. How do we American Christians and Jews deal with the issue in our conversations?
I remember my PhD advisor, the very wise Earl Kent Brown of Boston University, once told me you can't write history until at least fifty years after the fact. The publishers of The Annals obviously hadn't heard that maxim--after all, they didn't even wait a month! Still, it should be fascinating--now that it is almost fifty years later, to take a peek and see if history does have anything to teach us. I suspect it does!
Contained in the volume are articles about Vatican II, Black consciousness and the Black church, fundamentalism, the growth of interest in Eastern religions, and the growing battle over abortion and contraception. The authors are--at least for those of us schooled in the world of church history--some of the real rock stars of the era: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, James Gustafson, James Cone and Richard John Neuhaus among others. I have not read any of the articles yet. I'm hoping to find the time to sit down and read straight through the 140 pages or so of sixties related materials. I suspect it will be a trip down memory lane, after all, I'm a child of the sixties! But I also suspect I'll be amazed at how little we've moved on some of the issues.
One piece, for instance, discusses the matter of civil religion. I'm convinced we still haven't figured out the appropriate role of religion in the public square, we still don't have what Phyllis Tickle calls a good "theology of religion." And fundamentalism? Well, today most folks think Islam when they hear the word fundamentalist--but truth be told there is still a large contingent of such folks in Christian circles. How does that have bearing on society? One of the articles talks about Jewish-Christian dialogue in the light of the Six-Day War. Now there's a seeming bit of ancient history. Lots has changed in Israel-Palestine since then--yet nothing seems to have changed. How do we American Christians and Jews deal with the issue in our conversations?
I remember my PhD advisor, the very wise Earl Kent Brown of Boston University, once told me you can't write history until at least fifty years after the fact. The publishers of The Annals obviously hadn't heard that maxim--after all, they didn't even wait a month! Still, it should be fascinating--now that it is almost fifty years later, to take a peek and see if history does have anything to teach us. I suspect it does!
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