Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life [Hardcover]

Douglas V. Porpora (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195134915 | ISBN-13: 978-0195134919 | Publication Date: June 21, 2001 | Edition: First Edition

Do you believe in God? Nine out of ten Americans unhesitatingly answer yes. But for Douglas Porpora, the real questions begin where pollsters leave off. What, he asks, does religious belief actually mean in our lives? Does it shape our identities and our actions? Or, despite our professions of faith, are we morally adrift?
Landscapes of the Soul paints a disturbing picture of American spiritual life. In his search for answers to his questions, Porpora interviewed clerks and executives, Jews, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and even followers of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. He asked them about God, and about what they saw as their own place in the universe. What he found was a widespread inability to articulate any grand meaning of life. We lack heroes to inspire us. We lack a sense of calling, of transcendent purpose in our existence. Many of us seem incapable of caring deeply about the suffering of others. Our society is permeated with moral indifference. Yes, we are a believing people, but God is often a distant abstraction and rarely an emotional presence in our lives. Only such an emotional connection, Porpora argues, can be the basis of a genuine moral vision.
Our emotional estrangement from God and the sacred keeps us from caring about social justice, keeps us from wanting to change the world, keeps us enclosed in our own private worlds. Landscapes of the Soul is a passionate call to broaden our spiritual and moral horizons, to raise our eyes to the greater reality that unites us all.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The meaning of life for me is just to enjoy myself." "It's all relative to your point of view." The rootless sentiments of today's college students are the springboard for Douglas V. Porpora's impassioned defense of the importance of moral foundations. Landscapes of the Soul is a cri de coeur from a self-identified left-wing "campus radical" who finds common cause with cultural conservatives like Allan Bloom because they share a belief that moral truths are real and independent of our varied perspectives. But Porpora thinks that the central problem is not skepticism, but rather a basic lack of interest in "cosmic meaning." The problem isn't that we don't believe in God; it's that we just don't care.

Porpora goes into the fabric of American culture, interviewing Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Buddhists, urbanites and rural folks, atheists and New Agers, and drawing from a variety of ages, races, and levels of education. He argues that no matter what your "point of view," the modern landscape of American morality is bleak, impoverished by the thin soil of a relativism that is as vacuous as it is pervasive. Porpora's remedy is a reorientation that is infused with spiritual meaning. He wants us to return to a way of being that asks incessantly: "Is there a human destiny we were meant to fulfill?" --Eric de Place

From Publishers Weekly

Drexel University's Porpora is troubled that Americans have lost "moral purpose." That's happened, he says, not because we are following the lead of an adulterous ex-president or because consumer capitalism cultivates greed rather than charity, but because we no longer have emotional relationships with God. A sociologist, Porpora conducted interviews with dozens of Americans of all religious stripes. Americans believe in God, he concludes, but our belief is a highly theoretical, ratiocinated one; we may check off "theist" on a questionnaire, but we don't feel very much about God. Porpora's research indicates that many people, for example, deny having any personal experience of the divine. (One wonders how many of America's millions of evangelicals or Wiccans, for that matter Porpora interviewed.) If only we would get emotional about our deity, he argues, the nation's moral fabric would be stronger. The book is a tad diffuse. Porpora's digression, for example, into what we can know about the historical Jesus is not quite on point. He also repeatedly asserts that the postmodern claim of the death of the individual self is untenable, but he doesn't adequately connect that argument with his larger thesis. Ultimately, the book fails to convince. Porpora asserts axiomatically that emotional connection to God is the sine qua non of leading a moral life, but he never proves the axiom. Still, the gauntlet has been thrown down, and this volume is sure to be a provocative conversation starter.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (June 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195134915
• ISBN-13: 978-0195134919
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,743,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling analysis of American malaise, July 9, 2002

By 

Susan Tridgell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (Hardcover)

Doug Porpora aims to explain a paradox: how can the American public's beliefs about God have so little influence on their lives? It is an interesting issue, one which has ramifications far beyond contemporary America: Barbara Tuchman's study of fourteen century France, for instance, raises similar issues of contradictions between the beliefs people espouse and their conduct. Tuchman notes that "empathy is . . . the final obstacle" to understanding the Middle Ages. She sees religious belief as the key difficulty here.

Empathy is one of Porpora's greatest strengths and some of the most remarkable parts of this book occur when he enters into dialogue with people who hold beliefs which many would dismiss as bizarre. Porpora is able to illuminate the beliefs of others, to make them intelligible. He elucidates the importance of tarot cards for one person, or another's belief that he has heard the voice of God. What Porpora brings out is the importance (or lack of importance) of these beliefs in people's lives, how they function to modify behaviour or why they have no effect on behaviour.

The book is aimed at the general reader and is extremely engaging at this level; Porpora takes advantage of endnotes to point academic readers on to other sources. Porpora sketches in an argument that the postmodern experience of the self is true phenomenologically but not ontologically, an argument which he pursues in detail in some of his academic articles.

One of the many aspects which Porpora explores is how a sense of larger purpose (in some cases provided by passionate religious belief, in others by a quest for social justice) influences people's experience of themselves. This book is more than a sociological analysis, it is a call to action.

Some book reviewers have assumed that Porpora's call is essentially Christian, but it is far broader and deeper than that. It is essentially a call to heal a broken world. Porpora's promise to his readers is that commitment to larger purposes, to the creation of a world in which social injustice no longer dominates, will enrich their lives. Selfishness, Porpora believes, is doubly impoverishing: dealing out injustice to the poor and a sense of purposeless to the comfortable.