From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority (American Intellectual Culture)

An important contribution to the study of the history of American pragmatism, modern methods of literary criticism and hermeneutics, and 20th-century Protestant theology. . . . Highly recommended.' _Choice 'Drawing on fiction and poetry, Lundin illumines the philosophical issues he explores while never losing the thread of argument. This could well be one of the more important books written in recent times, and hopefully it will receive the wide readership it so richly deserves.' _Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke University, and author of With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology 'Roger Lundin has provided a powerful 'genealogy of moral authority'.' _Christianity Today Magazine In this remarkable work, Roger Lundin seeks the source of American moral and cultural authority in the shift from nature to experience figured in the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While the pragmatic tradition concludes that experience must generate the very light that will lead us out of its own darkness, From Nature to Experience returns to religion for illumination and truth. This is a story of nineteenth-century sources and twenty-first century consequences in which literature, history, philosophy, and theology are joined in order to form a truly original critique of American culture. Read more