Over the course of the 20th century, liberal Christian intellectuals - both Protestant and Catholic - created a body of theological reflection on the rise and triumph of corporate capitalism. Unlike their secular counterparts on the left, they drew on religion to make sense of the emerging world of professional expertise, industrial technology and therapeutic selfhood. "Christian Critics" explores their social thought and cultural criticism and examines the sometimes unexpected ways that these Christian leaders perceived the nation and its people. Offering portraits of a diverse selection of critics - including Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Dorothy Day, Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Michael Novak, Mary Daly and Garry Wills - Eugene McCarraher argues that together they left a contradictory legacy. While all supported movements for the rights of labour, racial minorities and women, some endorsed the military-industrial order that established the professional-managerial class as a dominant national force, while others favoured a decentralized political economy of worker self-management.
At the same time, McCarraher recasts the debate about the "therapeutic ethic" by tracing a shift, not from religion to therapy, but from religious to secular conceptions of selfhood.
- ISBN10 0801434734
- ISBN13 9780801434730
- Publish Date 27 April 2000
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 9 January 2009
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Cornell University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 272
- Language English