Mark Edwards smartly situates Walter Lippmann smack dab in the thicket of American exceptionalism and its religious facets. As such, Edwards' book is a welcome reminder of a public intellectual whose insights were arguably wiser than Reinhold Niebuhr's. Edwards' Lippmann could well turn out to be the better guide to the spiritual dilemmas of the United States' global dominance in the twentieth century than any voice the nationâs churches produced.
Mark Thomas Edwards is professor of US history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. He has published articles in Religion and American Culture, Diplomatic History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Religions, and the Journal of Religious History. He is the author of The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism (2012) and Faith and Foreign Affairs in the American Century (2019). In the Spring of 2018, he served as Fulbright Senior Scholar to Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, Korea, where he taught American diplomatic history.