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Article: Religion as Poetry.
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- September 13, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By Andrew M. Greeley. Transaction Publishers, 281 pp., $32.95.
IN THIS CHEERFUL, sensible, casually written book, Andrew Greeley, the country's most famous priest-sociologist-novelist, steers an awkward course between chatty sermon and technical study. Greeley insists that religion is a mighty factor on the American scene and, more specifically, that "religious stories" (the "poetry" in his title), "particularly as they are expressed in images of God, will predict, at low to moderate levels of correlation, political, social and familial stories."
Greeley backs up this modest thesis with a host of tables and graphs. But he covers vast historical and theoretical ...