Bøger af Andrew Ball

Yvonne Knopf experienced many changes in her early years. She was born into a close-knit Jewish family in Brussels, Belgium in 1939. The Nazis were persecuting the Jews and as living conditions became more trying, her family had to struggle to survive.Yvonne hid with her mother and a few other relatives in a convent. Later, when Yvonne's mother became ill, they moved to the cellar of a drugstore. She eventually lived on her own with a non-Jewish family, hiding her identity. When WWII ended, she was reunited with her mother but learned that her father had perished in Auschwitz.In 1947, Yvonne and her mother immigrated to Chicago, Illinois. Young authors Andrew Ball and Mackenzie Rice have done a marvelous job writing and illustrating her true story for readers of all ages.

Examining how economic change influences religion, and the way literature mediates that influence, this book provides a thorough reassessment of modern American culture. Focusing on the period 1840-1940, the author shows how the development of capitalism reshaped American Protestantism and addresses the necessary role of literature in that process.Arguing that the "spirit of capitalism" was not fostered by traditional Puritanism, Ball explores the ways that Christianity was transformed by the market and industrial revolutions. This book refutes the long-held secularization thesis by showing that modernity was a time when new forms of the sacred proliferated, and that this religious flourishing was essential to the production of American culture.Ball draws from the work of Émile Durkheim and cultural sociology to interpret modern social upheavals like religious awakenings, revivalism, and the labor movement. Examining work from writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Jack London, and Countee Cullen, he shows how concepts of salvation fundamentally intersect with matters of race, gender, and class, and proposes a theory that explains the enchantment of modern American society.