From Nature to Experience The American Search for Cultural Authority

"Roger Lundin explores this shift from nature to experience as the source of moral and cultural authority in America. Drawing on the resources of Protestant theology, he examines one of America's central intellectual traditions and shows the crucial possibilities it puts forth as well as the vexing problems it confronts. In the end, where the pragmatic tradition concludes that experience must generate the very light that will lead us out of its own darkness, From Nature to Experience returns to religion for illumination and truth." "A story of nineteenth-century sources and twenty-first-century consequences, this work brings together literature, history, philosophy, and theology to form a truly original critique of American culture."--BOOK JACKET.