In this book, a fairly unknown history of the mid-century intellectual world is uncovered, showing how the books that everyone was reading in the 1950s led directly into the world of the 1960s and thereafter. In the midst of general prosperity, a general discomfort with the shallowness of the suburbs led to an indiscriminate rejection of conventionality and a widely shared respect for independence, which encouraged the thought process during the '60s counterculture. Marsden addresses the various Christian thinkers of the time, Niebuhr and Tillich among others, and the tensions between their thinking and that of more conservative Christians on one side and a secular society on the other. His observation is that the 1950s was the last decade
