About this item
The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States during the 1950s Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, Presbyterian minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking. Selling millions of copies worldwide, the book offered a gospel of self-assurance in an age of mass anxiety. Despite Peale's success and his ties to powerful conservatives such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy, the full story of his movement has never been told. Christopher Lane shows how the famed minister's brand of Christian psychology inflamed the nation's religious revival by promoting the concept that belief in God was essential to the health and harmony of all Americans.
About the Author
Christopher Lane teaches at Northwestern University. A former Guggenheim fellow and a winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, TIME, and several other newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale University Press, November 2016) .
His other books include The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011) and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007) , now in six translations. He writes for the Huffington Post and a blog for Psychology Today called "Side Effects."
