Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-gr6zb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-20T15:39:44.327Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

America's Teilhard. Christ and hope in the 1960s. By Susan Kassman Sack. Pp. xii + 324 incl. frontispiece. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019. $34.95 (paper). 978 0 8132 3165 5

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2020

Sam Brewitt-Taylor*
Affiliation:
Lincoln College, Oxford
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Type
Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Susan K. Sack's monograph, closely based on her 2014 doctoral dissertation, tells the story of the posthumous reception of the religious thought of the French Jesuit, palaeontologist and visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the United States between 1960 and 1972. Sack's first concern is to chart how that reception shifted across the decade, from the rising enthusiasm of the ‘early years’ (1961–4), to peaking interest during the ‘years of hope’ (1965–7), to Teilhard's falling out of fashion during the ‘bitter years’ (1968–70). Her second concern is to argue that these shifts directly reflected the evolving social context of Sixties America. A third concern, less salient than the other two, is to suggest that Teilhard's thought, when properly situated in its Christological context, contains valuable insights for American Catholics today. The monograph is based on careful and detailed scholarship: Sack seems to have read practically every discussion of Teilhard printed in 1960s America, and she skilfully evokes the central themes of Teilhard's sometime opaque theology. Considerable care is taken to construct the social context from well-established secondary sources, especially Robert Ellwood's The sixties spiritual awakening, Mark Silk, Hugh McLeod and Sidney Ahlstrom. At the same time, the book's guiding determination to explain Teilhard's reception as the direct product of social context means that this context is often read monolithically, its inherent ambiguities and conflicts glossed over: ‘modernity’ is often treated as univocal rather than essentially contested; whilst America's ‘liberal Sixties’ is well-covered, recent work on the rival ‘conservative Sixties’ goes largely unmentioned. The book's theoretical framing is a little ambiguous, as Sack insists that American Catholicism was being forced to adapt to ‘modernity’ whilst positioning America itself as transitioning from ‘modernity’ to ‘postmodernity’; either of these framings might be critiqued as teleological from a ‘multiple modernities’ perspective. Finally, the book's conclusion is reticent on the subject of how its arguments might refine or challenge existing wider perspectives on the ‘religious crisis’ in 1960s America: this is our loss, because Sack's thoughts on this subject would have been enlightening. This thorough and detailed book is recommended for specialists interested in America's ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s.