Religious Perspectives in American Culture. Edited by James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison. (Religion in American Life, Vol II.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. 427 pp. $7.50.

1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-118
Author(s):  
Robert Michaelsen
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
American Life ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Religious Perspectives

Four

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Bruno Maçães
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Political Correctness ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Love Affair ◽  
American Life ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Traditional Structures

This chapter assesses whether America deserves to be placed alongside those Asian societies which, for all their progress, remain more or less shackled by tradition. The United States has been for more than a hundred years the very image of modernity. In the postwar decades, it appealed to European intellectuals such as Sartre on account of its deracinated life. The music, the literature, the architecture of those years were an extravaganza of countercultural passion, breaking with every convention. If people now feel that Americans are after all too conventional, there is reason to suspect that something else is happening and that their love affair with religion, guns, and the death penalty is to be explained from sources other than the persistence of traditional structures. The chapter offers an alternative explanation, looking in turn at these three peculiarities of American culture. It also considers an element of contemporary American life where differences with an older European sensibility seem clear enough: political correctness. Ultimately, one can see that a distinctive mark cuts across American experience as a whole, becoming more visible in those areas where it breaks away from its European past. One may call it the marker of a new civilization.

New Times, New Challenges

2012 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Traditional Practices ◽  
Half Century ◽  
American Life ◽  
New Process ◽  
The World ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Changing World

In The World Is Flat (2005), Thomas Friedman sounded an alarm across American culture with his concise portrayal of a rapidly changing world that will directly challenge many traditional practices of American life-in everything from business to education. In many ways, Friedman's twenty-firstcentury siren is an extension of Albert Einstein's postulate of more than a half century earlier: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Both Friedman and Einstein insist that new times and new challenges require new ideas, relentless analysis, and constant readjustment; in this way, we can ensure that any new process delivers what we need it to.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document