1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910809038203321

Autore

Lane Christopher

Titolo

Surge of Piety : Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life / / Christopher Lane

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, CT : , : Yale University Press, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

0-300-20373-X

0-300-22527-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (221 pages)

Disciplina

285.7092

Soggetti

Religion - United States - History - 20th century

United States

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- I. Religio-Psychiatry Arrives in New York -- II. On the Couch with Freud -- III. From Acute Shyness to "World Conquest" -- IV. The Peale-Hoover-Eisenhower Empire -- V. Psychiatry Goes to Church -- VI. Religion and Mental Health Rebalanced -- Coda. Faith as an Ongoing Force -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States during the 1950s Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, American minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking. Selling millions of copies worldwide, the book offered a gospel of self-assurance in an age of mass anxiety.   Despite Peale's success and his ties to powerful conservatives such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy, the full story of his movement has never been told. Christopher Lane shows how the famed minister's brand of Christian psychology inflamed the nation's religious revival by promoting the concept that belief in God was essential to the health and harmony of all Americans. We learn in vivid detail how Peale and his powerful supporters orchestrated major changes in a nation newly



defined as living "under God." This blurring of the lines between religion and medicine would reshape religion as we know it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.