Product Description

Roger Lundin traces how pragmatism and its reliance on experience eclipsed nature and religion as the ultimate moral authority. He explores why Americans prize experience as highly as they do, what they build out of it in works of culture and their daily lives, how they manage to make sense of it, and where people might turn when they reach the limits of experience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1116813 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
"In this immensely moving, intelligent, and beautifully written book, Roger Lundin has made a formidable case." -- Denis Donoghue

"This could well be one of the more important books written in recent times." -- Stanley Hauerwas

From the Publisher
In his first major work, Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson hymned the praises of nature as an enduring source of spiritual tonic and moral power. Yet as he later expressed in his essay, "Experience", Emerson came to doubt that evil would disappear or that nature could provide solid ground for the spirit's dwelling. Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers turned to experience to provide anchors for values and paths to God. In the decades after the Civil War, divining value from utility became the premise and the promise of pragmatism, the one genuinely indigenous philosophical movement America has ever produced.

Roger Lundin explores this shift from nature to experience as the source of American moral and cultural authority. Drawing on contemporary Protestant theology for guidance, he examines one of America's central intellectual traditions and shows the crucial possibilities it puts forth as well as the vexing problems it confronts. In the end, where 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.

A story of nineteenth-century sources and twenty-first century consequences, this magisterial work brings together literature, history, philosophy, and theology to form a truly original critique of American culture.