John Murray Cuddihy is an American sociologist. He is a member of the doctoral faculty at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York

City University of New York

The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

 (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

Sociology of religion

The sociology of religion concerns the role of religion in society: practices, historical backgrounds, developments and universal themes. There is particular emphasis on the recurring role of religion in all societies and throughout recorded history...

. Cuddihy has been described as a "Catholic atheist,", and "a brilliant yet eccentric critic of contemporary American Jewry".

Academic career

Cuddihy received his Bachelor's degree from St. John's College (Annapolis), three M.A.s: two from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and a third from the New School for Social Research in New York City. He took a Ph.D. in Sociology at Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

.

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

Works

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

In The Ordeal of Civility, Cuddihy explicates the wrenching process of adjusting to modernity

Modernity

Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...

 experienced by the shtetl

Shtetl

A shtetl was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe until The Holocaust. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania...

 Jews

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

 of the Pale

Pale of Settlement

The Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia, in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed, and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited...

 in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had to adapt quickly from a tribal culture to a modern Protestant civil culture rather than slowly adjusting over the centuries. It is in this context that he locates the efforts of Jewish intellecuals, such as Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

, Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 and Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....

 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

Civil religion

The intended meaning of the term civil religion often varies according to whether one is a sociologist of religion or a professional political commentator...

, Cuddihy argues that Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in America gave up the distinctive religious claims of Catholicism

Catholicism

Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

 and Judaism, respectively, in the interests of not offending the Protestant majority. Cuddihy views various intellectual critiques of modernity - both conservative and radical

Political radicalism

The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...

 - as the product of resentment

Resentment

Resentment is the experience of a negative emotion felt as a result of a real or imagined wrong done. Etymologically, the word originates from French "ressentir", re-, intensive prefix, and sentir "to feel"; from the Latin "sentire"...

against the more successful, enlightened, Protestant majority.