What is Molly Worthen reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Molly Worthen, author of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism.

Her entry begins:

I’ve just finished two marvelous and very different books. A few weeks ago, one of the many essays eulogizing the late philosopher Marshall Berman called his 1982 masterpiece, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, a “prose poem.” This description, even more than the rapturous reviews of Berman’s erudition and insight, prompted me to finally pick up this book. Berman’s thesis is that “ we have missed or broken the connection between our culture and our lives,” and “the modernisms of the past can give us back a sense of our own modern roots, roots that go back two hundred years.” The only way to escape from political and cultural despotism that leaves humans “pulverized by the dead hand of the future” is to recover the wisdom of the philosophers, novelists, and artists who first understood the perils that modern freedom and power entail. All That Is Solid had the same impact on me that I know it has had on...[read on]

About Apostles of Reason, from the publisher:

Evangelical Christianity is a paradox. Evangelicals are radically individualist, but devoted to community and family. They believe in the transformative power of a personal relationship with God, but are wary of religious enthusiasm. They are deeply skeptical of secular reason, but eager to find scientific proof that the Bible is true.

In this groundbreaking history of modern American evangelicalism, Molly Worthen argues that these contradictions are the products of a crisis of authority that lies at the heart of the faith. Evangelicals have never had a single authority to guide them through these dilemmas or settle the troublesome question of what the Bible actually means. Worthen chronicles the ideological warfare, institutional conflict, and clashes between modern gurus and maverick disciples that lurk behind the more familiar narrative of the rise of the Christian Right. The result is an ambitious intellectual history that weaves together stories from all corners of the evangelical world to explain the ideas and personalities-the scholarly ambitions and anti-intellectual impulses-that have made evangelicalism a cultural and political force.

In Apostles of Reason, Worthen recasts American evangelicalism as a movement defined not by shared doctrines or politics, but by the problem of reconciling head knowledge and heart religion in an increasingly secular America. She shows that understanding the rise of the Christian Right in purely political terms, as most scholars have done, misses the heart of the story. The culture wars of the late twentieth century emerged not only from the struggle between religious conservatives and secular liberals, but also from the civil war within evangelicalism itself-a battle over how to uphold the commands of both faith and reason, and how ultimately to lead the nation back onto the path of righteousness.

Learn more about Apostles of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

Worthen is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill.

Writers Read: Molly Worthen.

--Marshal Zeringue