Le chiese protestanti oggi

 This essay offers a general survey of American Protestantism in the last decades within the pluralistic outline of American society. The traditionally conflicting denominational division is explored in the light of the new and more effective difference between liberal and conservative approaches, while the recent and unexpected growth of Evangelicalism and Southern style religion is focussed on as the more characteristic feature of recent developments.    

The Religious Right played a crucial role in the ‘80s as a cultural and political support to Reagan and the most conservative sectors of the Republican Party. Today, as we witness an evident decline of those forms and especially of televangelism, other groups come out with new approaches and claims, such as the Christian Coalition and the Promise Keepers. Their development is explored to outline the present scenery and possible future trends.

Among the new theological approaches which came out in the ‘60s, feminist theology has often been seen as the most radical challenge to traditional religion. Its theoretical bases are here outlined in order to give a general survey of the present trends, while exploring their relationship with feminism on one hand and Churches on the other.

Among the new theological approaches which came out in the ‘60s, feminist theology has often been seen as the most radical challenge to traditional religion. Its theoretical bases are here outlined in order to give a general survey of the present trends, while exploring their relationship with feminism on one hand and Churches on the other.

Characterizations of postmodernism as a post-secular phenomenon – in se beyond the domain of religion – underestimate the role of spirituality not only in popular culture, but also in postmodern texts. An extensive interest in spiritual experience acts of resistance against conventional secularization, and the modernist demand for disenchantment that often bring to the front marginalized – although fragmented – traditional cultures. This calls for a revision of the postmodern literary canon and the essay explores authors such as Pynchon, Reed, or DeLillo, together with authors who are not generally considered postmodern.

During the last decade much has been written in America about the Amish. Through these works, the essay traces the Amish roots to rethink the idea of time in their culture. Can we say that the Amish context remained fixed to the Seventeenth century? Rather, we find a number of related but different concepts of time in their culture: the time of the community, signed by the Ordnung, and the individual time linked to the phases of rural life, emotions and the spiritual search for a sacred time.

This article analyses the development of Midwestern cities, from being magnets for growth to the gradual crisis, due to the dispersion of production and suburbanization after the Depression. Today there is an opposition between decayed inner cities and affluent outer belt that has produced an enormous amount of destruction, competition among neighborhoods and racial segregation. This unsettles the notion of the city as a repository of human artifacts creating a collective history and a common space. The cities of the Midwest need to be read through new critical categories ranging from entropy, placelessness, fragmented materiality, non-progressive time, wilderness and the notion of “ruins in reverse” put forward by environmental artists such as Robert Smithson.

On the background of the relation between literature and ideology, the essay considers ideology in The Portrait of a Lady (which D. Izzo analyzed in “Ácoma” 12), challenging the prejudice according to which ideology is a discourse that transforms history into nature. In fact ideology can also take upon itself the opposite function, i.e. the stressing of historical dynamism. In a world wherein “all that is solid melts into air”, which role is assigned to the most flexible individuals? Their flexibility is heightened, but it tends to become eccessive and leads them towards mistake and the loss of themselves. This is apparently Isabel’s destiny. But ideology has also the function of reducing the space of desire, of narrowing and of subordinating it to a “manque” which can be filled up. Ideology states that desires can be mutually satisfied; James’s novel, however, does not comply with an ideology of reciprocity. The most complex characters cannot be defined on the basis of a “manque”, but rather on the basis of a “manque en” (or a “manque entre”), that is on the basis of their heterogeneity and of their internal struggle.