Broschiertes Buch

Paradise Joe's a Cultural Sociology of a Christian College Community

An Exploration Into the Meaning and Significance of American Evangelicalism

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In Paradise Joe's a rogue cultural sociologist demonstrates how evangelicalism came to occupy such a large portion of the ideological heart of American society and politics. He transforms what might have been a conventional academic case study into an entertaining, jargon-free tale of one small Christian college community, an historical and contemporary ethnographic account filled with memorable local and national characters, all the while gleaning from it the larger meaning and significance of evangelicalism in American life. Why has evangelicalism made a progressive, European-style social de...

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Michael F. Sparks was a Searle Fellow at the University of Chicago, from which he received a phd in sociology. A small sample of defining Chicago vignettes: --Returning from Seattle after the holidays his first year to discover his Volkswagen fastback buried in snow. --Exchanging a wave and salutation with Mohammed Ali in Hyde Park. --Driving Edward Shils up to Mr. Barnes's Great Expectations bookstore in Evanston to collect books ordered for our class. Asked by Shils if there was anything in particular I might be looking for, the First Trilogy of Joyce Cary came to mind. Off Barnes goes, returning with a rare first edition. Cary, the favorite author of us both, a coincidence explored over dinner in Hyde Park. --Patiently listening to Shils's many stories/complaints about Saul Bellow. --Becoming the only sociology grad student on whose dissertation committee the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins ever sat. --While waiting with Marshall for the sociologists to arrive for the defense, laughing out loud about one of their "unreadable" UC Press books. --The awkward post defense soirée at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap. --Directing the driver of a bus full of Japanese tourists to the Fermi sculpture on campus. >Having completed his University award nominated dissertation (the original "let's get this off to publishers" version of Paradise Joe's) during the worst job market in departmental history, Mr. Sparks suffered a nervous breakdown and spent nearly twenty years in a chronic depression that effectively ended all prospect of an academic career. A faculty member recruiter from SUNY Plattsburg shared over the phone that the recommendations he had received from Chicago were the "most glowing he'd ever read." Too little, too late. Throughout the subsequents years of depression Mr. Sparks worked at various levels of primary and secondary education, creating and contracting out a literacy program, co-creating a more diverse New Honors Program for a Seattle middle school (characterized as "out of step" by the Seattle School District following a Seattle Times column praising the program), and teaching college-level courses for senior citizens at the Lifetime Learning Center. He is the author of occasional published newspaper op eds, numerous unpublished papers and essays, and of the forthcoming books, Something Happened: How to Survive Depression and the American Way of Life--A Field Guide for Beginners and The Dusk of Everything: The Origins, Meaning, and Significance of the American Evangelical Rebellion of the Last Half-Century. About the latter a distinguished editor at Columbia University Press recently wrote "Thanks for copying [bcc'ing] me! Despite being 1000+ emails in arrears I got hooked on your manuscript. It is definitely publishable, in my opinion--a passionate manifesto--so I thought about presses that would be brave enough to do so." As she had explained a few years earlier about Paradise Joe's, I was without the necessary credentials that would allow her to champion the book in the roundtable dust-ups with other editors; this, largely the case elsewhere as well. As for the broader background, due to an engineer jack-of-all-trades father the author acquired various fundamental building trades and car mechanics skills. Together with a carpenter, he drew up plans for and assisted in an architecturally-consistent remodel and addition to his family's 1908 Craftsman-style bungalow. While an undergraduate at the University of Washington he was a part-time starter on the freshman basketball team during Tex Winter's tenure as varsity coach, Winter later going on to become the offense coach for Phil Jackson and the Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers. Discovery of a congenital spinal defect ended Mr. Sparks athletic career after one year, he then redirecting his efforts towards academics, becoming a student of Guenther Roth (a Max Weber scholar) and David Wagoner in the English department.