292. Glock, Charles Y. and Robert Bellah, eds., The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976.
Papers on a narrowly-defined ethnographic present, depicting the emergence of a complex neo-religious "scene" in the San Francisco Bay area. The editors' papers here have been influential on the "changing cultural value" school, e.g. Tipton and Wuthnow (T. Robbins, 1983). Werblowsky (1982) found a great deal of fault with this, especially its narrow focus. Barker (1986) sees this as a major statement of the American civil religion theory, though according to an earlier (1979b) review this is a rather casual and superficial study of new religious movements of the Bay Area, whose emergence Bellah attributes to the erosion by social science of institutional legitimacy, hoping for a future academic utopia.
Return to Indexes