Synopses & Reviews
How did Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday become a national holiday? Why do we exchange presents on Christmas and Chanukah? What do bunnies have to do with Easter? How did Earth Day become a global holiday? These questions and more are answered in this fascinating exploration into the history and meaning of holidays and rituals. Edited by Amitai Etzioni, one of the most influential social and political thinkers of our time, this collection provides a compelling overview of the impact that holidays and rituals have on our family and communal life.
From community solidarity to ethnic relations to religious traditions, We Are What We Celebrate argues that holidays such as Halloween, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day play an important role in reinforcing, and sometimes redefining, our values as a society. The collection brings together classic and original essays that, for the first time, offer a comprehensive overview and analysis of the important role such celebrations play in maintaining a moral order as well as in cementing family bonds, building community relations and creating national identity. The essays cover such topics as the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday; the importance of holidays for children; the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa; and the controversy over Columbus Day celebrations.
Compelling and often surprising, this look at holidays and rituals brings new meaning to not just the ways we celebrate but to what those celebrations tell us about ourselves and our communities.
Contributors: Theodore Caplow, Gary Cross, Matthew Dennis, Amitai Etzioni, John R. Gillis, Ellen M. Litwicki, Diana Muir, Francesca Polletta, Elizabeth H. Pleck, David E. Proctor, Mary F. Whiteside, and Anna Day Wilde.
Review
"[O]ffers an effervescent mix of sociological and historical reflections on the state of holidays and rituals in American culture." - Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays
Review
"[P]rovides readers with a deeper insight into the ways in which holidays have been used and misused throughout American history. We learn of how Americans come together on their special days and how those days, sometimes, reveal social strains. A necessary volume for anyone who cares about how Americans reveal community and perform civic obligation."
"[O]ffers an effervescent mix of sociological and historical reflections on the state of holidays and rituals in American culture."
"[A] new and welcome framework for understanding the meanings of holidays in our multi-cultural society. Any simple explanation of even the most familiar celebrations will be challenged in reading this wide-ranging collection."
Review
"A great service for all of us who teach undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. religious history. This fine historian has provided us with a representative collection of primary texts, in the process allowing our students the opportunity to encounter the diversity of evangelicals and evangelical ideas in twentieth-century America."-William Vance Trollinger,author of God's Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism
Review
"Scholars, students and the general reading public have long needed a book like this one. Its judicious selections, helpful introductions, and intelligent arrangement open up a history that has been too often obscured by partisanship and sloppy reporting."-Mark Noll,University of Notre Dame
Review
"Succinctly highlights issues that Christian Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are historically known for."
-Choice,
Synopsis
Evangelicalism retains the doctrine of biblical authority that developed during the Protestant Reformation as well as the sense that each individual stands in need of a life-transforming experience of forgiveness of sins that can only come through faith in Christ.
With the rise of the Christian Right in American politics over the past quarter-century, there has been renewed interest in Protestant evangelicalism and fundamentalism and their roles in American culture. Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism is a collection of key primary readings tracing the history and development of this religious movement and its intersections with American life and politics, spanning the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.
The documents deal with issues such as biblical criticism, theology, revivalist preaching, religion and science, religion and politics, and social concerns such as gender and race. Countering notions among some that evangelicalism is monolithic, the diversity of the movement is made evident in texts from the evangelical Left as well as the Christian Right.
Each section and many individual texts are prefaced by a brief editor's introduction explaining their background and context. During the period the book covers, evangelicalism went from being the dominant form of religion in America, then to the fringes, then back into the mainstream. These texts provide the reader with a sense of the central core as well as the range of evangelical thinking in the past century.
About the Author
Amitai Etzioni is University Professor at the George Washington University, where he is the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including
The Monochrome Society,
The Limits of Privacy, and
The New Golden Rule. He is a past president of the American Sociological Association.
Jared Bloom is research assistant at the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, George Washington University.