"Pretty much like the rest of the country, only more so." This quip from Wallace Stegner well-represents the Pacific region's religious culture. California, Nevada, and Hawaii emerged more recently, more quickly and with more diversity and fluidity than the other United States. Although influenced by Mexican Catholicism, Native Traditions, Asian Religions, and Euro-American Christianity, no religious tradition dominates, and a secular ethos usually reigns. But this very religious indifference makes California and the rest of the region open to all sorts of missionary movements and religious innovations. New organizational forms, new spiritual therapies, and new religious hybrids all compete for residents' attention along with secular ways for making meaning. With all these options, residents of the region mix, match, and move between religious identities more than other Americans. Without ignoring its diversity, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Region highlights the key aspects of the region's fluctuating religions and its spirituality's impact on political life.

Until recently, religious institutions have been organized to suit the traditional American family, where the wife stayed at home, caring for children. "Work, Family and Religion in Contemporary Society" discusses how churches and synagogues today are beginning to adapt to the reality of the American family: dual-career marriages, high levels of divorce, interfaith marriages, partnerships that may not be marriages. Religious organizations must serve families that don't fall into the "Ozzie and Harriet" mold.
The first group of papers in this edited volume documents changing trends in the connection between religion, work, and the family. As families change, as more women enter the paid work force, and as more people advocate individualism and feminist principles, a barrier grows between families and organized religion. Traditional families still feel tied to conventional religious participation, but people committed to new patterns of family and work are looking for alternatives.
In the second part of the book, we see how changing families and flexible congregations are experimenting with new forms of religious life. Many religious organizations have started day care centers, are hospitable to women clergy, have changed to inclusive language, and alter their weekly schedules. African-American churches are tying work and family to religion, while dealing with both the "truly disadvantaged" and the black middle class which may feel alienated from the church. Other examples of special efforts include groups at the margins of institutional religious life: Catholics who meet without a priest, house church groups, and even further outside organized religion, Limina, a group offormer Catholic women who draw on ancient rituals to celebrate women. In this book, we see how non-traditional families are turning away from religion as they have known it, but are creating new spiritual patterns.

In large chain bookstores the "religion" section is gone and in its place is an expanding number of topics including angels, Sufism, journey, recovery, meditation, magic, inspiration, Judaica, astrology, gurus, Bible, prophesy, evangelicalism, Mary, Buddhism, Catholicism, and esoterica. As Wade Clark Roof notes, such changes over the last two decades reflect a shift away from religion as traditionally understood to more diverse and creative approaches. But what does this splintering of the religious perspective say about Americans? Have we become more interested in spiritual concerns or have we become lost among trends? Do we value personal spirituality over traditional religion and no longer see ourselves united in a larger community of faith? Roof first credited this religious diversity to the baby boomers in his bestselling "A Generation of Seekers" (1993). He returns to interview many of these people, now in mid-life, to reveal a generation with a unique set of spiritual values--a generation that has altered our historic interpretations of religious beliefs, practices, and symbols, and perhaps even our understanding of the sacred itself.

The quest culture created by the baby boomers has generated a "marketplace" of new spiritual beliefs and practices and of revisited traditions. As Roof shows, some Americans are exploring faiths and spiritual disciplines for the first time; others are rediscovering their lost traditions; others are drawn to small groups and alternative communities; and still others create their own mix of values and metaphysical beliefs. "Spiritual Marketplace" charts the emergence of five subcultures: dogmatists, born-again Christians, mainstream believers, metaphysical believers and seekers, and secularists. Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews for over a decade, Roof reports on the religious and spiritual styles, family patterns, and moral vision and values for each of these subcultures. The result is an innovative, engaging approach to understanding how religious life is being reshaped as we move into the next century.

This book takes a novel, cultural approach to studying mainline denominations, focusing on the denominations' religious and moral vision--the beliefs, values, symbols, stories, and style that make a denomination distinct. Of special concern are the ways in which denominations passed on their vision and how they maintained plausibility under changing circumstances. Contributors include a variety of authors, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, educators, and liturgists who examine ways in which denominations have sought to transmit their culture with varying degrees of success or failure.

Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney argue that a new voluntarism is slowly eroding the old social and economic boundaries that once defined and separated religious groups and is opening new cleavages along moral and life-style lines. Nowhere has the impact of these changes been more profoundly felt than by the often-overlooked religious communities of the American center, or mainline--Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish.

"American Mainline Religion" provides a new "mapping" of the families of American religion and the underlying social, cultural, and demographic forces that will reshape American religion in the century to come. Going beyond the headlines in daily newspapers, Roof and McKinney document the decline of the Protestant establishment, the rise of a more assimilated and public-minded Roman Catholicism, the place of black Protestantism and Judaism, and the resurgence of conservative Protestantism as a religious and cultural force.

"Religious outsiders" as seen through the eyes of Euro-American Christians are nothing new, but the growing range of religious diversity in the United States has reached new heights of visibility as well as deeper intensities of tension. As U.S. communities of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs strengthen, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians wrestle for America's soul and control of the country's religious identity.

In this tumultuous environment, can Americans truly embrace a more widespread religious pluralism, which can be incorporated into the nation's civil religious symbolism and genuinely affirmed in public rituals? Religiously, can we as Americans rethink our identity and view ourselves as a "multireligious nation" and not simply as Christian or Judeo-Christian? And how does religious pluralism dovetail with the idea of multiculturalism?

The articles in this volume of The ANNALS explore these and other key questions by examining the contemporary religious climate in the United States. Specifically, readers will gain a better understanding of how faith communities are pulled into networks and niches that bond them with some traditions while dividing them from others. Organized into three major topics, the articles in this volume delve into this urgent topic of our day and offer valuable insights in the following areas:

I. Broad Perspectives - Providing a solid foundation, this opening section lays the groundwork for clarifying this complex issue. The articles in this section examine religious pluralism through historical, social, and cultural lenses while exploring the persuasive power of rhetoric and symbol, in both the religious and civic realms.

II. Region and Religion - The papers in this section point to the importance of regional history and culture in shaping differing styles of pluralism within America.

III. Minority & Immigrant Experiences - Focusing on contemporary immigrant and minority groups in the United States, these articles reflect on the experiences of Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and Latino religions as well as the role of interfaith leaders in the 2005/2006 immigration reform debate.

IV. Institutional Patterns - Examining creative ways that pluralism is flourishing within the United States, these articles provide a framework for future interfaith dialog.

Social scientists, religious scholars, policy makers, and the informed public will find this volume of The ANNALS to be a valuable resource that distills this complex and sometimes cloudy issue of religious pluralism.