Garry Wills: New book on religion gets mixed review in the NYT
[Patrick Allitt teaches history at Emory University and is the author of “Religion in America Since 1945: A History.”]
Garry Wills, one of America’s best journalists and historians of the last half-century, has always enjoyed taking familiar subjects and staring at them long and hard until they look strange and new. In “Head and Heart” he invites readers to reconsider American religious history, challenging the conventional wisdom on many issues while synthesizing much of the finest recent scholarship. It is an odd and quirky book, however, going into extremely fine detail in some areas, hurrying past others with a few casual remarks, and deviating in its last hundred pages into political polemic....
Wills seems content, once he gets to about 1920, merely to summarize other religious historians’ general accounts. A great cliché-smasher elsewhere, he now relies on stock phrases in passages on “the Roaring Twenties” and “the Radical Thirties.” A weak chapter on the 1960s begins tendentiously: “It was a time for burning flags, and draft cards, and R.O.T.C. buildings and bras. Also for self-incinerations.” What follows is hardly more than a list of radical individuals and groups, and there is no explanation of the (extremely rare) cases of antiwar protesters who set fire to themselves. He mentions the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and the American Indian Movement, but not their religious dimensions, even though each had a fascinating religious history of its own, with continuing resonances today. A section on religion and the Vietnam War is bizarrely attenuated, consisting of just two sentences.
Particularly disappointing is that the Catholic Church, about which Wills has written brilliantly at many points in his career, gets short shrift here. An early passage promises a discussion of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez as exemplars of both head and heart. When it comes to the point, however, Chavez gets just a page and Day is forgotten completely. Catholicism seems altogether not to fit very well into Wills’s principal categories. These shortcomings make the end of the book less rewarding than the ingenious and thought-provoking 400 pages that precede it.
Read entire article at Patrick Allitt in the NYT BOok Review
Garry Wills, one of America’s best journalists and historians of the last half-century, has always enjoyed taking familiar subjects and staring at them long and hard until they look strange and new. In “Head and Heart” he invites readers to reconsider American religious history, challenging the conventional wisdom on many issues while synthesizing much of the finest recent scholarship. It is an odd and quirky book, however, going into extremely fine detail in some areas, hurrying past others with a few casual remarks, and deviating in its last hundred pages into political polemic....
Wills seems content, once he gets to about 1920, merely to summarize other religious historians’ general accounts. A great cliché-smasher elsewhere, he now relies on stock phrases in passages on “the Roaring Twenties” and “the Radical Thirties.” A weak chapter on the 1960s begins tendentiously: “It was a time for burning flags, and draft cards, and R.O.T.C. buildings and bras. Also for self-incinerations.” What follows is hardly more than a list of radical individuals and groups, and there is no explanation of the (extremely rare) cases of antiwar protesters who set fire to themselves. He mentions the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and the American Indian Movement, but not their religious dimensions, even though each had a fascinating religious history of its own, with continuing resonances today. A section on religion and the Vietnam War is bizarrely attenuated, consisting of just two sentences.
Particularly disappointing is that the Catholic Church, about which Wills has written brilliantly at many points in his career, gets short shrift here. An early passage promises a discussion of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez as exemplars of both head and heart. When it comes to the point, however, Chavez gets just a page and Day is forgotten completely. Catholicism seems altogether not to fit very well into Wills’s principal categories. These shortcomings make the end of the book less rewarding than the ingenious and thought-provoking 400 pages that precede it.