John Murray Cuddihy

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John Murray Cuddihy (born c.1922) is an American sociologist. He is a member of the doctoral faculty at the Graduate School and University Center of he City University of New York (GSUC).

He is the author of No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste and The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, two books in the sociology of religion. Cuddihy has been described as a "Catholic atheist,", and "a brilliant yet eccentric critic of contemporary American Jewry"^[1].

[edit] Academic career

Cuddihy received three M.A.s: two from Columbia University and a third from the New School In Social Research in New York City^[2]. He took a Ph.D. in Sociology at Rutgers University.

He has taught courses in sociological theory, sociology of religion, and the sociology of diaspora Jewry.

[edit] Works

His doctoral dissertation was later published as The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity^[3]. No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste was published in 1978.

In The Ordeal of Civility, Cuddihy brilliantly explicates the wrenching process of adjusting to modernity experienced by the shtetl jews of the pale in the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries who had to leap quickly from a tribal culture to a modern protestant civil culture rather than slowly adjusting over the centuries and the efforts of jewish intellecuals marx,freud and and others to facilitate the transition by providing a cohesive narrative that attempts to universalize the experience and thus provide an apologia to both the ingroup of jews and the outgroup of gentiles...

In No Offense, a critique of American civil religion^[4], Cuddihy argues that Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in America gave up the distinctive religious claims of Catholicism and Judaism, respectively, in the interests of not offending the Protestant majority.

Cuddihy views various intellectual critiques of modernity--both conservative and radical--as the product of resentment against the relatively more successful, enlightened, Protestant majority.

Reportedly, the courtyard at 1088 Park Avenue was built for him as a child.