Rise of Liberal Religion

In The Rise of Liberal Religion Matthew Hedstrom tells the story of how, beginning in the 1920s, American religious leaders joined forces with the publishing industry in an attempt to form a ''spiritual center''--a set of widely accepted religious ideas, practices, and presuppositions that would hold together a fragmenting society, create new markets for books, and maintain the privileged status of these arbiters in American religious discourse.

Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

Introduction
Chapter 1: Enlarging the Faith: Books and the Marketing of Liberal Religion in a Consumer Culture
Chapter 2: The Religious Book Club: Middlebrow Culture and Liberal Protestant Seeker Spirituality
Chapter 3: Publishing for Seekers: Eugene Exman and the Religious Bestsellers of Harper and Brothers
Chapter 4: Religious Reading Mobilized: The Book Programs of World War II
Chapter 5: Inventing Interfaith: The Wartime Reading Campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews
Chapter 6: Religious Reading in the Wake of War: American Spirituality in the 1940s
Conclusion
Archival Collections
Notes
Index