by Robert Ellwood
Rutgers University Press, 1994

t was a decade like no other, and nothing has been quite the same since the Sixties, especially in the minds of those who were there. The 1960s were many things to many people: politics, music, drugs, extremist lifestyles all come to mind. But above all new kinds of spirituality. This book is about the Sixties in American religious history as a time of one of the periodical spiritual awakenings that have swept through the nation's religious life. Indeed, the Sixties were a time of several different yet interconnected awakenings: civil rights, the Vatican II revolution in Roman Catholicism, the antiwar movement and the "counterculture," the birth of new styles of evangelicalism, and much else. In this book I attempt to narrate and interconnect these strands, linking them to a model of American faith moving from modern to postmodern styles of being religious (or spiritual) in that tumultuous decade.

I hope you will join me on my quest for the spiritual Sixties in this book. Read it, and be sure to let me know what you think of it.