Worship Weblog
Monday, August 14, 2006
The Interstate: Road away from worship
From Martin Marty’s Sightings:
Remembering the Sabbath
-- Martin E. Marty
8/14/06Sightings of religious issues in public life this week appeared along the highways and in the Jewish weekly The Forward (August 4). Columnist Jenna Weissman Joselit reminded readers that this is the fiftieth anniversary of the Interstate Highway System, a legacy of the Eisenhower era. As Joselit tells it, that system, and the vehicles that cruise on it, brought vast changes in Judaism.
The column illustrated a main theme favored by historians of religion. Changes that affect understandings of God, attendance at worship, and other aspects of religious life derive less from concordats and changed creeds than from subtle shifts in behavior. The wholesale and often uncritical embrace of popular culture in broad evangelicalism, the disappearance of long-term Catholic behavioral patterns, the political shifts and emergences and retreats of various church bodies would not appear in books on creeds, confessions, and councils. Yet the high-rise and the long weekend are bigger God-killers than Nietzsche ever was.
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