God and the Atlantic

This book has an ambitious agenda. Its main purpose is to try to make sense of, and ultimately bridge, what Thomas Albert Howard calls a ‘transatlantic religious gap’, an abiding religiosity in America juxtaposed against a rising European secularity. The size of this gap is important because it affects political, economic, and social and cultural relations between European nations and the United States. That it appears to be growing, according to Howard, is a matter of concern. How are we to understand it? Howard believes that we can best make sense of it by examining European opinion on religious belief in America. As he notes, ‘the accretion of perceptions of difference in the cultural-religious sphere often functions as a prism of interpretation that informs, at once subtly and profoundly, judgements and attitudes about numerous contemporary issues’. To undertake a thorough study of this question would require a book of colossal proportions. The author has a more modest, yet no less significant, aim here. He offers a survey of three centuries of European intellectual opinion on America, starting with Crevecoeur’s 1781 Letters from an American Farmer and ending with Jacques Maritain’s 1958 Reflections on America. This, in itself, is a highly ambitious task, and Howard sets out to accomplish it with relish and no small measure of skill

Environmental ethics · Interpretation (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Religiosity · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies