STILLPOINT Archive: last updated 05/29/2012
From nearly 400 titles submitted by 52 publishers, God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide by Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard, Stephen Phillips Chair of History, and director of both the Center for Christian Studies and the Jerusalem and Athens Forum, has been selected as one of only 15 to receive Christianity Today’s 2012 Book Award.
Published by Oxford University Press, Howard’s 272-page book explores the United States’ and Western Europe’s diverging religious paths to modernity. University of Notre Dame historian and author Mark Noll called Howard’s book "a path-breaking exploration. For breadth of research, depth of historical insight, and timeliness of publication, God and the Atlantic is an unusually fine work."
On choosing God and the Atlantic for the history and biography category (in a tie with Oxford University Press’s biography of Charles Hodge), CT editors wrote: "Howard’s elegantly written book adds depth and clarity to a question that has long confounded Americans and Europeans: Why has religion become an influential political force in America even though it was stripped of formal political stature? Howard has mined the writings of a stunning variety of European intellectuals, conservative and liberal, who judged the American experience to be out of step with modernity."
Howard is also the author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism, and Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University, which was a winner of the Lilly Fellows Program Book Award for 2007.
"This award for his important book reinforces what we at Gordon have long known: Tal is an exceptionally productive scholar and astute observer of culture and ideas," said Gordon Provost Mark Sargent. "His latest book rekindles interest in some relatively forgotten American and European thinkers, offering new, richly textured perspectives on religion in American and European civic life."
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