Paul Wink & Michele Dillon 
In the Course of a Lifetime 
Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change

In the Course of a Lifetime provides an unprecedented portrait of the dynamic role religion plays in the everyday experiences of Americans over the course of their lives. The book draws from a unique sixty-year-long study of close to two hundred mostly Protestant and Catholic men and women who were born in the 1920s and interviewed in adolescence, and again in the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, and late 1990s. Woven throughout with rich, intimate life stories, the book presents and analyzes a wide range of data from this study on the participants’ religious and spiritual journeys. A testament to the vibrancy of religion in the United States,
In the Course of a Lifetime provides an illuminating and sometimes surprising perspective on how individual lives have intersected with cultural change throughout the decades of the twentieth century.

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List of Illustrations

Preface


1. The Vibrancy of American Religion

2. Meet the Parents: The Family Context Shaping Religious Socialization in the 1930s and 1940s

3. Adolescent Religion in the 1930s and 1940s

4. The Imprint of Individual Autonomy on Everyday Religion in the 1950s

5. The Ebb and Flow of Religiousness across the Life Course

6. Individual Transformation in Religious Commitment and Meaning

7. Spiritual Seeking

8. The Activities, Personality, and Social Attitudes of Religious and Spiritual Individuals in Late Adulthood

9. Spiritual Seeking, Therapeutic Culture, and Concern for Others

10. The Buffering Role of Religion in Late Adulthood

11. American Lived Religion


Methodological Appendix: Measuring Religiousness and Spiritual Seeking in the IHD Longitudinal Study

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, is author of Catholic Identity: Balancing Reason, Faith and Power and Debating Divorce: Moral Conflict in Ireland. She edited Handbook of the Sociology of Religion. Paul Wink, Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College, has written extensively on adult development and is coeditor, with J. James, of The Crown of Life: Dynamics of the Early Post-Retirement Period.