Religion’s Influence On Popular Culture Discussed

“Yes, Lord, I’m Comin’ Home! Country Music Stars Share Their Stories of Knowing God” By Lesley Sussman (Doubleday, $19.95)

It was no fluke that the Grand Ole Opry got its start in Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, a former church founded by an evangelist, and country-music artists are the first to credit gospel music’s influence on their genre.

Not all profess a Christian faith, but many do.

In 28 profiles, such stars as Naomi Judd, Barbara Mandrell, Charlie Daniels, Marty Raybon (of the group Shenandoah) and Glen Campbell tell how belief in God, often rediscovered in the midst of crisis, helped them weather storms of spousal abuse, drug addiction, illness and despair.

“Redeeming Culture: American Religion in the Age of Science” By James Gilbert (Chicago, $28.95, June)

Gilbert, professor of history at the University of Maryland, traces the confrontation between science and religion from the 1925 Scopes trial, which cemented the creationism-vs.-evolutionism controversy, to the 1962 world’s fair in Seattle, where a religious pavilion failed to lure as many visitors as the Space Needle and futuristic monorail but fulfilled a perceived need to celebrate both religion and science in a massive public forum. The early 1960s marked the end of the “big epoch of science” as the beginning of a new dialogue between science and religion.