Growing Up Religious

Résumé du livre

How do Christian and Jewish Americans recall their religious upbringing and how does it affect their adult lives? Growing Up Religious offers a fascinating portrait of how Americans think about, reflect on, recapture, and reproduce the religious experiences of their childhoods. Exploring personal stories gathered in interviews with more than two hundred people from a variety of ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds, Robert Wuthnow discovers that what brings adults back to religious life often has less to do with religious institutions than with the way family and other relations formed around religious practice: memories of mothers, fathers, and neighbors whose everyday acts were imbued with religious meaning. We read about people like Bruce Gallahue, whose relationship to religion changed as he went from growing up in a mainline Protestant home, where his image of God was based on fear and strict rules, to an adult struggle as a recovering alcoholic, when he was able to receive comfort by returning to Protestantism with a new vision of God as compassionate and forgiving