Blessed Assurance : At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas

by MOJTABAI A. G.

• ISBN13: 9780815605089
• ISBN10: 0815605080
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-09-01
• Publisher: Syracuse Univ Pr

Summary

In 1982, with Cold War anxieties running high, A.G. Mojtabai set out for Amarillo, Texas, home of Pantex, the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the United States. Through the lens of this particular city, she sought to focus on our adaptation as a nation to the threat of nuclear war. Her interviews began with Pantex workers assured of both the necessity and the safety of the work that they did, and in the steady, beneficent, advance of science. Working alongside them were fundamentalist Christians who believed in inevitable catastrophe, and who testified to quite another, blessed, assurance of Divine rescue from the holocaust to come. This startling juxtaposition of apocalyptic and technocratic world views was not confined to Pantex. Blessed Assurance brilliantly examines this clash of spiritual visions as it presented itself repeatedly in the streets, churches, and corporate offices of Amarillo. The voices that you hear in this book are those of the people of Amarillo speaking for themselves. Their narratives powerfully reveal their hopes and fears, their sense of the meaning of history, and the future of the human race. Blessed Assurance won the year's Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the South in 1986.

Table of Contents

Advisory	ix
PART I	3	(84)
1 Amarillo by Morning	3	(11)
2 Lay of the Land	14	(9)
3 Barbed Wire and Roses	23	(15)
4 Defense-Impacted	38	(8)
5 After Long Silence	46	(17)
6 Final Assembly	63	(24)
PART II	87	(54)
7 The Last Frontier	87	(9)
8 Prayer in the Schools	96	(13)
9 Christians Divided	109	(10)
10 All or Nothing: An Introduction	119	(7)
11 Christian Citizenship	126	(15)
PART III	141	(46)
12 Incurable	141	(11)
13 "I Don't Want to Be Here"	152	(14)
14 In a Fervent Heat	166	(21)
PART IV	187	(42)
15 Steady Growth	187	(11)
16 Wholesome	198	(10)
17 Right Hand, Left Hand	208	(11)
18 Bound Where?	219	(10)
Notes	229	(21)
Index	250