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Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. By Mark Oppenheimer. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. xii, 284 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-300-10024-8.)
It is not just that American religion was so diverse and complicated in the 1960s and 1970s that makes the challenge of addressing the subject so daunting; it is that this was an era, in American religion as elsewhere, where change, or at least turmoil, often reigned. Mark Oppenheimer admirably succeeds in meeting the challenge of explaining all this, and I applaud his Knocking on Heavens Door.
Oppenheimer considers change in five quite varied religious groups: the Unitarians, Roman Catholics, Jews, Southern Baptists, and Episcopalians. He focuses both on church institutional structures...