What would Jesus read? : popular religious books and everyday life in twentieth-century America /
Erin A. Smith.
- xiii, 394 pages ; 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-390) and index.
Part I. The social gospel and the literary marketplace. What would Jesus do?: reading and social action -- The Dickens of the rural route: Harold Bell Wright and Christian melodrama -- Part II. The 1920s religious renaissance. Good books build character: promoting religious reading in the 1920s -- Jesus, my pal: reading Bruce Barton's Jesus -- Part III. America's God and Cold War religious reading. Pealeism and its discontents: Cold War religion, intellectuals, and the middlebrow -- The cult of reassurance: religion, therapy, and containment culture -- Part IV. Reading the apocalypse: Christian bookselling in the 1970s and 1980s. The Late great planet earth and evangelical cultures of letters in the 1970s and 1980s -- End-times prophecy for dummies: The Late great planet earth -- Part V. The decade of the soul: the 1990s and beyond. Books for the seeker: liberal religion and the literary marketplace in the 1990s -- The new Gnosticism: gender, heresy, and religious community.
Christian literature, American--History and criticism. Religious literature, American--History and criticism. Literature and society--History--United States--20th century.