Sixties Spiritual Awakening American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern Book

Read Hugh McLeod's The Religious Crisis of the Sixties instead.

The Sixties Spiritual Awakening has something to offer readers with a real specialist's interest. Ellwood dug through the back files of Time, Newsweek, Christian Century and a smattering of other religious publications and he provides an overview of what religion-related issues were in the mass media's eye. Each chapter also includes a section in which he provides a brief discussion of the books about religion that attracted public attention.

But there are a couple of problems that make this more of a two star than a three star book--I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt because I'm pretty sure I'd have a good conversation with him should we cross paths and I'm in sympathy with his general perspective. First, when he provides general background on the decade, it's essentially a compendium of semi-cliches, not so much inaccurate as unnuanced. I'm obviously the wrong reader for that. Second, and more crucially, he introduces a Thesis (capital T) in the introduction claiming the Sixties were the point when modernism turned into postmodernism. It's an argument that a. hinges on definitions crafted to support the argument; and b. doesn't add much to the material anyway.