Religion and American Culture, Diplomatic History, Anglican and Episcopal History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, and the Journal of Religious History. His first book, The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (2012) offers a new view of Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism, and the geopolitics of the ecumenical movement.
Edwards applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Walter Lippmann: American Skeptic, American Pastor, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test both does and doesn't work for my book. Page 99 is entitled “The Older Lippmann” and offers a brief overview of chapters four through seven. The concluding sentence, “Lippmann’s deepened affiliation with and distance from Christian and Jewish traditions, as well as his embrace and rejection of civil religions, is emphasized throughout,” does hint at major themes of the book, but it is not much to work with apart from reading the introduction of preceding text. That said, readers could infer that, if there was an “Older Lippmann,” there must have been a “Younger Lippmann,” and thus they would have stumbled upon the major organizational framework for the biography. For some time, Lippmann has served as a pawn in the culture wars, with liberals remembering him as a “Tired Radical” who abandoned socialism and conservatives embracing him for his critiques of New Deal liberalism. In fact, Lippmann can't be carved up so neatly in terms of his political, cultural, and religious affiliations. Lippmann did live long enough to endorse both Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon for President twice. Yet elements of his self-professed conservativism of the 1970s could be seen in his Harvard term papers of 1909 when he identified as a socialist. Conversely, Lippmann expected Nixon to continue the Keynesian economics he had learned to love as a critical New Dealer. And so the notion of “Younger” and “Older” Lippmanns is predominantly chronological in nature: Lippmann was once young, then he became old. I do date his transition around 1932 when he began writing his “Today and Tomorrow” op eds for the New York Herald Tribune a Republican newspaper confident enough to bring someone on board that Time magazine had called the “Moses of liberalism.” Lippmann’s weekly tone after that time was more settled, mature, and clerical—“Older”—even if his books became more, in his own words, “incurably eclectic.” Yet my hope is that readers will find much to admire and despise in all of the Lippmanns.Learn more about Walter Lippmann at the Oxford University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue