Book Review
Prognosis Pending
An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America by Joseph Bottum
Image, 2014
(296 pages, $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by John C. Chalberg
A more accurate subtitle for this book might have been "The Post-Protestant Ethic and a Dis-spirited America." After all, the thrust of Joseph Bottum's story of our "anxious age" is the "catastrophic" collapse of an American Protestantism that did so much over the course of the nineteenth century to buttress the American experiment—and the American spirit. Not so in the twentieth century, laments an anxious Mr. Bottum, who worries that what's left of mainline Protestantism is out to redefine the American spirit, rather than revive it.
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