Chapter 1: Embedded Religion
1. For an updated map of the kind I used and much more useful historical information on religion and geography see Edwin Scott Gaustad and Phillip L. Barlow, with the special assistance of Richard W. Dishno, New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
2. For a broader account than just my own see Howard P. Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 126–53. Chudacoff describes the period 1900 to 1950 as “The Golden Age of Unstructured Play.”
3. Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 1–9. For a nuanced discussion of an African American ghetto in Chicago in the Fifties and its achievement of “community because of adversity,” see Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 140–89.
Chapter 2: A Fusion of Faith, Culture, and Politics
1. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), x.
2. I think it fair to say Eisenhower would never have invaded Cuba, as Kennedy did in 1961, and would have been warier of being drawn into a land war in Vietnam.
3. Fred Siegel, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class (New York: Encounter Books, 2013), 112–13.
4. For instance, as late as 1994 the United States Information Agency published in print and online An Outline of American History, which led off a section on the culture of the 1950s with this summation: “During the 1950s, a sense of uniformity pervaded American society. Conformity was common, as young folks and old alike followed group norms rather than striking out on their own.” 202.194.48.102/englishonline/kwxx/mrmy/yj/…/ooah/ooah11.asp.
5. “Khrushchev Visits Iowa Farm; Says ‘God Is on Our Side,’ ” Associated Press, September 24, 1959, Daily Illini, 1.
6. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 259.
7. W. H. Lawrence, “G.O.P. Chiefs Push Eisenhower Draft; He Merely Smiles,” New York Times, February 18, 1955, 1.
8. “The Lonely Crowd at Prayer,” Christian Century, May 30, 1956, 663.
9. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, with an introduction by Martin E. Marty (1956; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 260.
10. Ibid., 83.
11. Ben Wattenberg, “How the Suburbs Changed America,” The First Measured Century, http://www.pbs.org/fmc/segments/progseg9.htm.
12. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (1956; reprint, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 287.
13. Ibid., 367.
14. Martin E. Marty, The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).
Chapter 3: Mediating Religion
1. David F. Wells, Revolution in Rome (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1972), 117, cited in Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystdrom, Is the Reformation Over? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 60. This brief book records an important historical transformation in Evangelical attitudes toward Roman Catholicism as a result of Vatican Council II.
2. James M. O’Toole, ed., The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 200–201.
3. A summary of my testimony can be found in John F. Hunt and Terrence R. Connelly, The Responsibility of Dissent (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1969), 136–37.
4. On the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae, the always candid Cardinal Francis George, then president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said of the encyclical and the dissent it generated: “It was the occasion for a direct conflict between many people’s experience as they expressed it and the authority of the church. We have then the beginning of the dissolution of the teaching authority of the church, with consequences we still live with.” See Daniel Burke, “Forty Years Later, Contraception Ban Colors US-Vatican Ties,” Religious News Service, 2008, undated.
Chapter 4: When the Secular Was Sacred
1. Ralph Clayborne Carson, Ralph E. Lucker, and Penny A. Russell, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 1, Called to Serve, January 1928–June 1957 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1.
2. Jesus as “the man for others” never caught on as a slogan. But after Father General of the Jesuits Pedro Arrupe, S.J., heard it mentioned by his American assistant general, Vincent O’Keefe, S.J., he directed that “men for others” should be the motto for the spiritual formation given to Jesuit high school students throughout the world. It still is.
3. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 17. It is interesting that in the first revised edition, published in 1966, Cox removed what he judged “the more egregious overstatements” of the first edition. Among the excised passages were the original subtitle I cite—it was replaced with a quote from a Newsweek review—and the phrase I cite.
4. William Hamilton, “The New Optimism—From Prufrock to Ringo,” in Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 164.
5. Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 57–58.
6. Ibid., 54.
7. William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, The Death and Life of Bishop Pike (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 262.
8. James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970), 50.
Chapter 5: Entrepreneurial Religion
1. Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007), 91. For fuller accounts of this incident see Carol V. R. George, God’s Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 195–210; Shaun A. Casey, The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 123–50. Casey’s account makes clear that the most obdurate anti-Catholic of the group was Harold Okenga, pastor of historic Park Street Church in Boston, Kennedy’s hometown. For Billy Graham’s brief account, in a late-in-life autobiography put together by his longtime editorial assistants, see Billy Graham, Just as I Am (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 390–92.
2. George Marsden, “Is Religion Dead?” Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 1995, 25. See also George Bigelow, “Let There Be Markets: The Evangelical Roots of Economics,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2005, 33–38.
3. How many of these books were actually written by Graham will probably never be known. But certainly the most recent volume, Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity and the Life Beyond, published in 2015 when Graham was ninety-six years old, deaf, enfeebled, and nearly blind, might best be described as an entrepreneurial effort by the BGEA, under the presidency of his son Franklin, to milk the brand. Given that the views expressed therein are at odds with Billy’s mature theological views, some critics might also consider it elder abuse.
4. Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). I am indebted to Wacker’s book for many facts and insights, but I disagree with his judgment on Graham’s role in the Peale-led effort to prevent the election of John F. Kennedy as president.
5. Robert N. Bellah, “The Civil Religion in America,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 174.
6. Marshall Frady, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979).
Chapter 6: Movement Religion
1. Coretta Scott King, “The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Theology Today 65, no. 1 (April 2008): 8–12.
2. Quotes cited from both newspapers can be found in Michael B. Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice like a Trumpet: White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 183.
3. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 380.
4. The return from Berrigan was so swift and polished that I have the feeling it was something he had already written—he was always writing because he was as committed to the writing life at least as much as to the life of an antiwar activist—but I was no less grateful for his sending it to me.
5. Kenneth L. Woodward, “A Guru on the Ramparts,” New York Times Book Review, February 21, 1988.
6. Richard J. Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 283.
7. Richard John Neuhaus, The Best of “The Public Square”: Book Three (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 138.
8. Edward K. Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 377–78.
Chapter 7: Religion and Revolution
1. Francine du Plessix Gray, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (New York: Knopf, 1970), 311–12.
2. Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 53. Although it began life as a doctoral dissertation in social theory, Smith’s book is by far the best book on Liberation Theology as a movement and its various consequences.
3. Ibid., 230.
Chapter 8: Women’s Liberation and the Feminization of Religion
1. Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: Norton, 1997), 116. This is a collection of pieces written before his death in 1994.
2. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 15–16.
3. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
4. Anne Braude, “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87–107.
5. David G. Hackett, “The Prince Hall Masons and the African American Church,” in David G. Hackett, ed., Religion and American Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 316.
6. Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 145.
7. Ibid., 168.
8. Origins: CNS Documentary Service 24, no. 4 (June 9, 1994): 1.
9. Some of the material presented here on seminaries first appeared in Kenneth L. Woodward, “Gender and Religion: Who’s Really Running the Show?” Commonweal 123, no. 20 (November 22, 1996): 9–24.
10. Elaine Justice, “Influx of Women Students Changing Seminaries, Churches,” Emory Report, October 30, 1995, http://www.emory.edu/EMORYREPORT/erarchive/1995/October/ERoct.30/10.30.95influx.of.wom.html. For a feminist seminary program for women and for men who identify with the feminist project, see Rebecca S. Chopp, Saving Work: Feminist Practices of Theological Education (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).
11. Joseph P. O’Neill, “Character Disorders and Cultural Dissonance Among Mainline Catholic and Protestant Clergy,” a presentation to a group of clinical psychologists and pastoral counselors who screen candidates for ordained ministry, June 1994. A draft copy of this presentation was provided to me at that time by the author. The tenor of his conclusions can be seen in the following lines from William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” with which he prefaced his presentation: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
12. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroads, 1983), 346.
13. Actually, the Catholic biblical canon contains many more and more interesting, more powerful women than the Jewish or Protestant biblical canons because the Catholic canon includes the so-called Deuterocanonical texts that, for various reasons, the creators of the Jewish and Protestant canons excluded.
14. Sandra Schneiders, I.H.M., “Women and the Word: The Gender of God in the New Testament and the Spirituality of Women,” 1986 Madeleva Lecture, delivered at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, April 17, 1986.
15. During all my years at Newsweek I can recall few articles in the theological journals I read in which feminist theologies were criticized, except by other women. But of course I am not a member of the theological guild and may have missed some. Nor was I ever alerted to a theological symposium in which men were invited to critique the feminist theological project. Early on, male theologians (most of them married laymen) seemed anxious to avoid the line of fire. Now that so many academically accomplished women are teaching theology in seminaries and universities, perhaps their male colleagues have concluded that—as in a good marriage—some arguments are not worth having. An exception is Francis Martin’s The Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994).
16. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), xiv.
17. There are many sociological reasons for this. Among them is the failure of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), a national organization of the heads of most religious congregations in the United States, to provide any leadership, responsibility, or proposals for attracting Catholic women to the religious life, or for studying what the various congregations—and the LCWR itself—might be doing that actually discourages new vocations. They seem to have a martyr’s death wish.
Chapter 9: Experiential Religion
1. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 138–39.
2. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 129.
3. Vernon Ruland, Imagining the Sacred: Soundings in World Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998), 65.
4. Kenneth Slawenski, J. D. Salinger: A Life (New York: Random House, 2010), 231–32, 252–53.
Chapter 10: Alternatives to Religion
1. Fortunately, my colleague Phyllis Malamud had an advanced degree in social science and graciously taught me what and whom to read and personally introduced me to many of the experts I would eventually study, quote, and get to know.
2. Nicholas Lemann, “How the Seventies Changed America,” American Heritage, July–August 1991.
3. Philip Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, edited and with an introduction by Jonathan B. Imber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 131–32.
4. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, introduction by Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 19–20.
5. It is worth noting that these and other theorists of the human potential movement who clustered at Esalen were not Americans but European immigrants, part of the mass migration of intellectuals from Central Europe to England and then to the United States that historian H. Stuart Hughes describes in his 1975 study, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
6. Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981), 3.
7. Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 180–81.
8. This theme runs throughout Lasch’s work. See especially his The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978).
9. The book that gave me the idea of doing a cover story on death in America was John S. Dunne’s superb study of death and immortality in Western culture: The City of the Gods: A Study in Myth and Mortality (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Dunne, a Catholic priest, was the only theologian among the Erik Erikson circle that gathered annually on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
10. In particular, see Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Chapter 11: Sacred Families
1. William A. Galston, “Home Alone: What Our Policymakers Should Know About Our Children,” New Republic, December 2, 1991, 41.
2. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,” American Scholar 62, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 17–30.
3. For a history of jeans and their meanings, see James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (New York: Gotham Books, 2006).
4. In his 2006 memoir, It’s News to Me: The Making and Unmaking of an Editor, Ed Kosner characterized “Who’s Raising the Kids?” as a “bland offering,” sandwiched between two hard-news cover stories on Squeaky Fromme, who tried to kill President Gerald Ford, and on another violent radical young woman, Patty Hearst. These were the first three cover stories Kosner published after his ascension to Newsweek’s top editorial post. As it turned out, that “bland offering” sold as well as the other two on the newsstand—newsstand sales being one of the ways the industry determines which newsmagazine editor has the best editorial instinct—and won for Newsweek its first and only National Media Award from the American Psychological Foundation.
5. A succinct formal articulation of this foundational Mormon doctrine is by Joseph F. Smith, sixth president of the church (1901–18), nephew of founder Joseph Smith Jr. and last church president to have known the Prophet: “Men and women may be saved singly, but men and women will not be exalted separately….The family is the foundation of eternal glory, the nucleus of a kingdom without end. The husband will have his wife, the wife her husband, parents their children forever, provided they secure them in the manner prescribed by him [the Heavenly Father] whose right it is to regulate all things pertaining to his kingdom.” See The Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph F. Smith (Salt Lake City, UT: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1998), 176–77.
6. Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 439.
7. Samuel Morris Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 278. In the same paragraph Brown makes another equally insightful point: “[T]he Latter-day Saints saw Jesus as the way not just to God but to Godhood, their guide to maturity as members of the species Ahman [Adam].” Brown is a Mormon, a physician by training, and is writing here of early Mormonism, not necessarily Mormonism today. A brilliant exercise in historical analysis.
8. The thirteen steps are summarized by sociologist Rodney Stark in Reid L. Nilson, ed., The Rise of Mormonism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 79–82.
Chapter 12: Piety and Politics: The Republicans and the Religious Right
1. Robert Scheer, “The Playboy Interview: Jimmy Carter,” Playboy, November 1976, 63–86.
2. That occurred in 1950 when Pope Pius XII proclaimed the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven—a belief that had been popularly held for more than a millennium—as a dogma to be affirmed by all faithful Catholics.
3. Steven P. Miller, The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 61.
4. Liberty has yet to play Notre Dame in football but on February 22, 2008, Liberty’s baseball team defeated Notre Dame 6–2 at an invitational in Clearwater, Florida. Jerry would have been ecstatic.
5. Robert Wuthnow, Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community (New York: Free Press, 1994), 4.
6. One could also see it as an iteration of his father’s “A Thousand Points of Light” initiative.
7. Franklin Foer, “Spin Doctrine: The Catholic Teachings of George W.,” New Republic, June 5, 2000, 18–20.
8. See, for example, Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (New York: Doubleday, 2006). A somewhat similar argument is made by Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006). I found both unpersuasive.
Chapter 13: Religion as Politics: The Democrats
1. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 133.
2. Quoted in Howard Chua-Eoan, “The American Quixote: The Death of George McGovern (1922–2012),” Time, October 21, 2012.
3. Steven M. Tipton, Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 76.104. I owe a huge debt—as on many other occasions in my career—to Tipton for the encouragement he gave me in looking at the Democratic Party through the lens of modern Methodism, though he is of course not responsible for what I have written.
4. Nathan O. Hatch, “The Puzzle of American Methodism,” in Nathan O. Hatch and John H. Wigger, eds., Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture (Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001), 27.
5. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 177–87.
6. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Knopf, 1991), 127–28.
7. Laurence H. Tribe, “The Abortion Funding Conundrum: Inalienable Rights, Affirmative Duties, and the Dilemma of Dependence,” Harvard Law Review 99, no. 1 (November 1985): 330, cited in Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991), 59.
8. Ibid., 58.
9. Jason Keyser, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Roe v. Wade Ruling Flawed,” Associated Press, May 20, 2013.
10. Kristin Luker, Abortion & the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
11. Letter quoted in William McGurn, “Bob Casey’s Revenge,” First Things, January 2005, 7.
12. After the debate, Hesburgh told a Newsweek reporter that he tried to bring ten Catholic bishops and ten Catholic politicians, including Cuomo, together to discuss their differences out of public view. Most of the bishops were willing but most of the politicians were not, realizing that word of the meeting would eventually leak out.
13. Cuomo was not a public intellectual in the manner of his fellow New York Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, though he did not deter those of his admirers who claimed otherwise. But he was, arguably, his era’s most celebrated public sophist. In dialogue with a gathering of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and secular academics, in which he discussed the principles behind his Notre Dame speech, Cuomo declared: “When I speak against the death penalty, I never suggest that I consider it a moral issue. I seldom talk in terms of moral issues. I am against the death penalty because I think it is bad and unfair. It is debasing. It is degenerate. It kills innocent people.” For the full text of his remarks, and respondents’ criticism, see E. J. Dionne Jr., Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Kayla M. Drogosz, eds., One Electorate Under God? A Dialogue on Religion and American Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). My own one-on-one exchange of opposing essays with Cuomo was published just before the 2004 presidential election in the September 24 issue of Commonweal under the collective cover title “Personally Opposed. But…,” which was the position Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry took.
14. Aida Torres and Jacqueline Darroch Forrest, “Why Do Women Have Abortions?” Family Planning Perspectives 20, no. 4 (July–August 1988): 169–76.
15. A week later I called Fallows to compliment him on the cover story—and on his guts for doing it. His voice sounded like a thin smile: I was, he said, one of a handful of readers and the only fellow journalist who admired the cover package. Even members of his own staff, he said, thought it reeked of “old-fashioned moralism.”
16. Kenneth L. Woodward, “What’s in a Name—The New York Times on Partial-Birth Abortion,” Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 19, no. 2 (2005): 427–42.
17. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jodi Wilgoren, “The 2004 Campaign: The Political Calculations; Undeterred by McCain Denials, Some See Him as Kerry’s No. 2,” New York Times, May 15, 2004, 1, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/us/2004-campaign-political-calculations-undeterred-mccain-denials-some-see-him.html.
18. John C. Green, The Faith Factor: How Religion Influences American Elections (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 77–79.
19. “Americans Learned Little About the Mormon Faith, but Some Attitudes Have Softened,” Pew Research Center Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 14, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/14/attitudes-toward-mormon-faith/. For a fuller analysis, see Green, The Faith Factor.
20. John C. Green, “Religion and the Presidential Vote: A Tale of Two Gaps,” Pew Research Center, August 21, 2007, http://www.pewforum.org/2007/08/21/religion-and-the-presidential-vote-a-tale-of-two-gaps/.
Epilogue
1. David Voas and Mark Chaves, “Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 5 (March 2016): 1517–56.
2. George P. Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23–24. Fletcher’s essay is an argument against liberal—that is, individualistic—rights-based morality.
3. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 48–50. The idea that nonrecognition is a form of oppression is not limited to the young. Gloria Steinem, the most recognized (and recognizable) feminist icon in the United States, had this to say last year at the age of eighty-one in a published conversation with Supreme Court justice Ruth Ginsburg: “I think Ruth is better at getting along with people with whom we profoundly disagree. I feel invisible in their presence because I am being treated as invisible.” See “Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gloria Steinem on the Unending Fight for Women’s Rights,” New York Times, November 15, 2015, ST1, ST3.
4. Arthur Kornhaber, MD, and Kenneth L. Woodward, Grandparents, Grandchildren: The Vital Connection (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981), xix–xx.
5. Drew DeSilver, “The Fading of the Teen Summer Job,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/23/the-fading-of-the-teen-summer-job/.
6. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, op cit., 18.
7. I owe the insights of this paragraph wholly to an op-ed essay by Bloomberg View economics writer Megan McArdle, “Kids These Days—and Their Rich, Anxious Helicopter Parents,” Chicago Tribune, December 2, 2015, 27.
8. Mark Bauerlein, “What’s the Point of a Professor?” New York Times, May 10, 2015, SR5.
9. Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 19–20.
10. Christian Smith, with Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 234.
11. Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, “Where A Is Ordinary: The Evolution of American College and University Grading, 1940–2009,” Teachers College Record 114, no. 7 (2012): 1–23.
12. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 37–40.
13. Ibid., 99.
14. Smith, Lost in Transition, 22.
15. Christian Smith, with Patricia Snell, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 154.
16. I owe this triadic formulation of the existential facts of life to theologian David Tracy, who has been addressing them throughout all his books.