{"title":"Books by Jon Butler","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780751540413","title":"Do Ants Have Arseholes?","description":"\u003cp\u003eHow easy is it to fall off a log? Where is the middle of nowhere? Do we really have no bananas? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe readers of OLD GIT magazine are a batty, befuddled, potty-mouthed bunch, who seem to spend a significant chunk of their spare time corresponding with the publication's popular letters page.  DO ANTS HAVE ARSEHOLES? is a very funny, very silly collection of questions and answers taken from this column, none of which has any basis whatsoever in fact. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA must for all those who relish a heady mixture of shaggy-dog stories, toilet humour and utter lack of insight.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294638977397,"sku":"9780751540413","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780751540413_92a01183-0a72-4a4e-b379-c9e8c34b7698.jpg?v=1786015067"},{"product_id":"god-in-gotham","title":"God in Gotham – The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan","description":"A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism.   In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity’s rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community.   Yet fears of religion’s demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem’s storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan’s young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island’s booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth.   God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than foundered in it. Far from the world of “disenchantment” that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481395241333,"sku":"9780674045682","price":26.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674045682.jpg?v=1786089653"},{"product_id":"awash-in-a-sea-of-faith-christianizing-the-american-people-paper","title":"Awash in a Sea of Faith – Christianizing the American People (Paper)","description":"Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement—even as secularism triumphed in Europe.   Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity’s powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual “holocaust,” with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account.   Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression—not its decline—and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481400418677,"sku":"9780674056015","price":33.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674056015.jpg?v=1786089658"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-jon-butler.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}