Posted on Friday, October 5, 2007
Oxford University Press released Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism by Dr. Angela Lahr, Westminster College visiting assistant professor of history.
"The book addresses how the American evangelical subculture was able to reconstruct its relationship with the mainstream political culture during the Cold War," Lahr said. "Conservative evangelicals engaged in religious practices inspired in part by their beliefs about the end-times to make sense of an increasingly dichotomous Cold War world. At the same time, Americans of all stripes were experiencing certain fears brought on by the nuclear age and anticommunism. Within this context, evangelicals became less marginal, creating a political foundation that would culminate with the prominence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s and the early 1980s."
The book, a revised version of Lahr's dissertation, took almost five years to complete. "I found the whole process sometimes surprising, always stimulating, often frustrating, but a lot of fun," she said.
The book is available through the Oxford University Press Web site (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/?queryField=author&query=Angela+Lahr&view=usa&viewVeritySearchResults=true).
Lahr, who has been with Westminster since 2006, earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Evansville and her master's and Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University.
Contact Lahr at (724) 946-7152 or e-mail lahram@westminster.edu for additional information.
