Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 11, 1995 TAG: 9506140033
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Marshall Fishwick. Harrington Park Press.
Marshall Fishwick has risen to the challenge of analyzing and assessing the fluid religious experiences of America from its founding to the present. What emerges is an intensive study and commentary on the virtues and vices of our varied religious movements and what those may hold for the future.
Fishwick, professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech, has written and lectured extensively on American popular culture. He brings a healthy blend of academic talent and personal experience to his most recent work, which he describes as an approach to "the dark and bloody ground of popular religion with open eyes and an open heart."
"Great Awakenings" theorizes that America's religious experiences move in cycles and these cycles closely parallel in time and tone other movements and significant events within popular culture. Thus, popular religion and popular culture cannot be fully understood without a sense of the other. "These cycles," writes Fishwick, "are not only historic; they are also mythic. Myths, especially those connected with religious rites and beliefs, explain how things work, and why. They are the poetry of history, the foundation upon which it is built."
The author treats religion with much respect, neither inflating nor belittling its importance, impact, or sincerity. However, "Great Awakenings" does not gloss over, but explores the failings and flaws of many popular religious personalities and the movements or groups they have founded and nurtured. Perhaps the most important contribution of this work, and its central thread, is the emerging and always re-emerging marriage of culture and faith resulting in a national civil religion. For those in society who wish us to stop just shy of a theocracy, or for those who think religion is peripheral to cultural realities, Fishwick provides some significant teachable moments.
- NELSON HARRIS
Knotted Tongues: Stuttering and the Quest for a Cure.
By Benson Bobrick. Simon & Schuster. $22.
This is an interesting social history of a common problem: stuttering. With a combination of anecdotes reflecting the suffering of some famous figures in history (Moses, Demosthenes, Winston Churchill) and a compilation of the evolving scientific hypotheses on its origin, Bobrick engages our interest. It will come as no surprise, should one ask why a historian might write on this topic, to find that the author himself has been a stutterer. Now, he has conquered this demon with the aid of a program similar to the renowned one operating locally at Hollins College.
- SIDNEY BARRITT
Nelson Harris is pastor of the Ridgewood Baptist church.
Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.
by CNB