![]() ![]() The story revolves around the church youth group, named Crossroads, from which Russ is ousted as leader in favor of a younger and cooler staffer who attracts a larger number of teens, including two of Russ’ children, to the group. ![]() Russ Hildebrandt is a middle-aged, mediocre, mid-career associate pastor at the fictional First Reformed Church in Chicago’s west suburbs. For those of us who have intimately experienced mainline Christianity as something that is perpetually and irreversibly being diminished, Franzen paints a compelling picture of what liberal, modern church and family life were like in the moments between mainstream Protestantism’s triumphant cultural hegemony and its slow but inevitable decline. Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” finds room for all of this in the story of a clergy family in a liberal Protestant church in the early 1970s, a world rarely explored in fiction in recent years. ![]() (RNS) - Guilt, gender expectations, awkward sexual awakenings, complex family relationships, all in a religious setting: our cultural chroniclers know where to hash out these themes, whether it’s in draconian patriarchal faiths (HBO’s “Big Love”), post-evangelical parodies (“The Leftovers”) or some other post-evangelical or, more likely, Catholic setting. ![]()
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