cover image Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in America

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in America

Randall Herbert Balmer. Oxford University Press, USA, $24.95 (264pp) ISBN 978-0-19-505117-9

The variegated forms of popular evangelicalism--fundamentalist, charismatic, Pentecostal--are investigated in this well-researched study. As Balmer, professor of religion at Columbia University, crisscrosses the country visiting a Dallas seminary, an Episcopal Indian settlement, a bible camp in the Adirondacks, an evangelical filmmaker, he explores not only the depth and variety of the appeal of American evangelicalism, but also his own ambivalence springing from his early grounding ``in the protective cocoon of this subculture.'' A personal journal of discovery as well as a substantial social history, the book presents men and women who, in their stories, render a collage of a religious movement. ( July )