In his presidential address to the 2011 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, David Hollinger focused on the contributions and successes of ecumenical Protestants in their mid-20th-century encounter with diversity. Hollinger, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, specializes in American intellectual history. His survey The American Intellectual Tradition is a widely used textbook. Among his other books are Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture and Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism.
In your account of mid-20th-century Protestantism, you use the term ecumenical Protestant instead of mainline, mainstream or liberal. Why do you make this choice?
I use ecumenical because it is much more specific historically and analytically than mainstream or liberal. Mainstream is a term that is too general and can cover almost anything. Liberal, too, is a term that you can apply to culture or politics as well as theology.
