Sunday, June 01, 2008
Growing Up Protestant
by Margaret Lamberts Bendroth
This was a pretty interesting read, though my wife enjoyed it much better than I. Ms. Bendroth takes a look the the role of home and family in the mainline Protestant denominations from the mid-19th Century through the 1980s. It was a changing relationship, one that seemed to be as much influenced by the surrounding culture and the emerging field of psychology as by the Bible. As a Lutheran, the book didn't really strike a chord with me. But then, it did with my wife, who's also a born, bred and baptized Lutheran. What does this mean? Was my upbringing more faithful to our religious traditions than hers? Or was my family just more working class? Ah, well, it really doesn't matter. The mainline churches never really found the perfect relationship between church and home. So when faced with our own church and family, we have to figure out our own equilibrium--just like the generations before us.
An intriguing bit of waiting room material.
LibraryThing link
This was a pretty interesting read, though my wife enjoyed it much better than I. Ms. Bendroth takes a look the the role of home and family in the mainline Protestant denominations from the mid-19th Century through the 1980s. It was a changing relationship, one that seemed to be as much influenced by the surrounding culture and the emerging field of psychology as by the Bible. As a Lutheran, the book didn't really strike a chord with me. But then, it did with my wife, who's also a born, bred and baptized Lutheran. What does this mean? Was my upbringing more faithful to our religious traditions than hers? Or was my family just more working class? Ah, well, it really doesn't matter. The mainline churches never really found the perfect relationship between church and home. So when faced with our own church and family, we have to figure out our own equilibrium--just like the generations before us.
An intriguing bit of waiting room material.
LibraryThing link
Labels: WaitingRoomMaterial
// posted by John @ 9:31 PM 
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