Books by Steve Tipton

November 2024, Steve Tipton has a new book out.
In and Out of Church: The Moral Arc of Spiritual Change in America
Why are so many Americans leaving church? Half no longer belong to a congregation. A quarter now say they are unchurched, up from one in six a decade ago and one in twelve a generation ago, led by more than a third of young adults. Where have they gone, and what are they doing instead? What moves them? What should we make of it? What can we learn as well from those who have stayed or returned, and from congregations that have sparked their continuing commitment or renewed participation?After decades of drift and several long years of grievous pandemic that shut church doors and crowded the internet, the time has come to weigh these questions more closely and answer them more carefully. We need to open a keener moral inquiry into the arc of spiritual change in America. We need to probe a thicker cultural account of intergenerational religious influence and inspiration that we practice today in forms of ritual action, sacred expression, and moral community that reach far beyond the pews. - from Amazon

3-13-15 - The Life to Come: Re-Creating Retirement, extends this moral and social inquiry into the manifold moral logics and cultural traditions at play in re-creating the practical meaning of retirement in the everyday experience and social imagination of Americans born in the postwar baby boom, one third of the nation's workers and voters, as they get set to retire over the next 20 years, and they look ahead to living a quarter of their lives beyond age 65. Ethnographically voiced and culturally meditated, this study explores their emerging ethos of retirement with a feel for its saving promise of true self-renewal and graceful fulfillment in the life to come in this world, however unsure salvation seems in the next. Attuned to the social facts of retirement rising and receding over the past generation, and attentive to moral counsel on retirement from spiritual, therapeutic and financial advisors, this inquiry springs from the personal stories, moral dialogues, and cultural sight lines of baby boomers who are sailing smoothly into retirement, those who are struggling and striving to get there, and those faced with falling short. - from Steve's page at the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation site. - an impressive page

Amazon.com link for the Life to Come

In this book Steven Tipton confronts a stubborn but perennial human dilemma with rigor and clarity. Eloquent and engaging.
--Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City and The Market as God

The Life to Come: Re-Creating Retirement is sure to engage anyone who reads it... see how carefully Tipton avoids the impersonal and cliché versions of advice-giving. Whoever reads this book will be introduced or reintroduced to experts, whose work bears on reflecting on "the life to come," including how to address and master many of the arts of living in retirement...This book is not about the "care of the very aged," but about facing and growing into retirement...I picture that readers will be better prepared for waking up to tomorrow, which means "living that life worth living." --from the foreword by Martin E. Marty

5-01-08 - Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life. This book focuses on what mainstream Christianity has to say about the war in Iraq and the recent gov. faith based initiatives - rather than the Christian right that TV news likes. Steve was a student of Shunryu Suzuki who went on to become a leading writer on sociology and religion. He's also a long-time supporter of cuke.com, the Cucumber Project and the new Shunryu Suzuki Legacy Project (name in flux). -dc

Amazon.com link for this book.
U of Chicago Press (Publisher) link
Emory University link - where Steve teaches

Read a review
A good, short description and review here

video of Steve speaking about his book, Public Pulpits

Public Pulpits starts off this pilfered image short by dc called Floating Mainstream Madness.

Tipton, Steve. Getting Saved from the Sixties. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982. [A Suzuki student sociologist takes a thorough and informative look at Suzuki students, EST, and a fundamentalist Christian Church.] Amazon link.

in the bibliography of Crooked Cucumber.

Look at all the books he's authored and co-authored

Co-authored - and this might not be all

Steve co-authored with Robert Bellah and others one of the maybe the best selling sociological books of modern times, Habits of the Heart.

Also with the same gang he co-authored The Good Society

And with the same minus Bellah, Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self

Also co-authored Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Society in American Life

Also, Religion and America: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age

Steve Tipton's Link Page

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