"William Dean’s splendid meditation on the spiritual character of American society is a distinctive and important contribution to the theology of culture. Like Sidney Mead and Robert Bellah, he believes that American society is replete with spiritual meaning, but Dean writes as a theologian. Like Paul Tillich, he believes that religion is crucially constitutive in culture, but Dean is a pragmatic historicist who rejects Tillich’s transcendental idea of God. Perceptive and engaging."
--Gary Dorrien, Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College and author of The Making of American Liberal Theology
"Who is God and what has God to do with Americans? Hard questions. But William Dean has explored them with insight and originality, opening up ways of thinking that had seemed closed and looking for light in places most scholars of religion would never look: jazz, football, and the movies. This is an intensely readable book that should reach a large audience of scholars and lay people alike."
--Robert Bellah, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley and coauthor of Habits of the Heart and The Good Society
"The reader should not assume that this book will be light reading because its title speaks of jazz, football, and the movies: it is instead a serious study of American culture from a spiritual or theological point of view. Dean (Iliff School of Theology, The Religious Critic in American Culture) aruges that culture of Ameica is religious not just because so many Americans belong to churches, synagogues, temples, or mosques but also because Americans look for some standard greater than themselves by which to love adn to judge their nation. In the second part, he discusses three creations of American culture-jazz, football, the movies-and how it took a culture like America's to give birth to these phenomena. America is a new country lacking old traditions, so Americans had to improvise; a hallmark of jazz is improvisation. Americans violently took over a wilderness; football is very much organzied violence. Without Old World traditions, Americans found new ones in the movies, cowboys, war heroes, gangsters, and more. There is much depth in this engaging, well-written book. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal
“Dean contributes some valuable insights and new material to the discussion [of the nation’s character]”
--Commonweal
William Dean is Professor of Constructive Theology at Illiff School of Theology. He is the author of 5 books and coeditor of another. His previous book, The Religious Critic in American Culture, won an AAR Award for Excellency in the Study of Religion in 1995.
