Word: herberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Published this week is a sharp-minded investigation of the American religious paradox. In Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Doubleday; $4) Jewish Author-Scholar Will Herberg maintains that both the religiousness and the secularism of the American people derive from much the same sources, and have combined to give the U.S. a religion...
...Three Branches. A man's religion in the U.S. is freighted with a special significance it does not have in other countries, says Herberg; it tells him where he stands. The immigrant to the U.S. in the 19th century was expected to change his language, customs, social attitudes-but not his religion. Second generation citizens, hungry to be "real Americans," tended to get away from their parents' ways as far and fast as possible. But the third generation looks back to find its identity: "What the son wishes to forget," said Historian Marcus Lee Hansen, "the grandson wishes...
...Biblical origin of the three faiths is not so important in this connection, Herberg believes, as the idea "that they are three diverse representations of ... the 'spiritual values' American democracy is presumed to stand for." Thus "it becomes virtually mandatory for the American to place himself in one or another of these groups . . . For being a Protestant, a Catholic or a Jew is understood as the specific way, and increasingly perhaps the only way, of being an American and locating oneself in American society...
Compromise with Mediocrity. One of the two non-Catholic writers included in the symposium is Jewish Author Will Herberg, who finds U.S. Catholicism today "at its highest point of prestige and spiritual power." But Herberg regrets "a tendency in Catholicism to smile indulgently upon men and pat them on the back, as it were. Catholicism thus comes forward as the friend of man, whereas Protestantism, with its unrelenting emphasis on judgment, sometimes appears as his enemy." Catholics' "spiritual geniality," writes Herberg, often combines with secularism to betray "Catholics into too easy an acquiescence in the banalities, timidities and mediocrities...
...even par golf for 36 holes to win the medal at the Easterns held last weekend at Princeton, will play first man. The remainder of the lineup will be about the same team that has seen action all season. Bruce Thurmond will be second; Jack Brophy third; Captain Dave Herberg fourth; Pete Malkin fifth; Jim Jones sixth; and Doug Boyd seventh. The freshmen will also play Yale...