A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Writing amid the early-2010s rise of religious disaffiliation, Diana Butler Bass interprets declining institutional loyalty alongside growing interest in experience, relationship, practice, and spiritual awakening. She places contemporary change within a broad history of American religious awakenings and asks whether Christianity might be moving from inherited patterns of believing, behaving, and belonging toward a more experiential form of faith.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It helps travelers see that their changing relationship to church may participate in a wider cultural movement rather than represent only private failure. The book also gives the Library an important historical snapshot: an influential progressive Christian reading of religious change at the moment the scale of disaffiliation was becoming widely visible.
Good starting place if…
You want an accessible, hopeful interpretation of why institutional religion has weakened and why practice, experience, and relationship may still remain spiritually significant.
Know before you begin…
Bass offers an interpretive historical pattern and a progressive Christian hope, not a settled forecast or a representative account of everyone who leaves religion. The book reflects early-2010s US conditions; later developments may complicate its language of awakening and its expectation that institutional decline will yield renewed spiritual community.