Elizabeth Powers

As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era. Continue Reading »

Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother by Peggy Orenstein Bloomsbury, 240 pages, $23.95 Waiting for Daisy is the chronicle of what happens when a busy, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Republicans seem to have lost the values voters in the midterm elections. William Saletan, author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War and frequent contributor on the subject of abortion for Slate.com, sees this loss as a chance for the Democrats to capture these voters, if . . . . Continue Reading »

We were walking through Central Park in Manhattan, just south of the Naumburg Bandshell, when we came across what we thought were the remains of an ancient churchyard. Like an ancient churchyard, it was seemingly untended and abandoned. On closer examination, it turned out to be a grove across which . . . . Continue Reading »

An academic colleague of mine has carved out considerable expertise for himself in the area of slavery. I roused his ire once by asking if, two centuries from now, people might regard abortion the way we now do slavery. This was at a meeting of Enlightenment-period scholars. There is in all of us a . . . . Continue Reading »

On the same day my husband applied for Social Security benefits, we watched the purple-faced Bill Clinton defending his record as terrorist hunter-in-chief in the infamous Fox-TV interview with Chris Wallace . All the obfuscations the former president brought to bear also brought to mind the . . . . Continue Reading »

Heather Mac Donald’s defense of “skeptical” (i.e., atheist) conservatives against the Religious Right has by now been widely disseminated. It first appeared in The American Conservative and drew a response , on this blog and in The National Review , from Michael Novak who (very . . . . Continue Reading »

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Loveby dava sobelwalker and company, 432 pages, $27 The first two terms of Dava Sobel’s subtitle—science and faith—inevitably suggest conflicts to us moderns. Yet, for the preeminent scientists of the seventeenth . . . . Continue Reading »

An autobiography is a strange beast. While it offers unique access to the inner life of an individual from the perspective of the only person capable of assessing it, it is problematic precisely because the self-knowledge of first-person narrators is problematic. Autobiography also posits a . . . . Continue Reading »

After Heaven:  Spirituality in America Since the 1950's.By Robert Wuthnow.University of California Press.  277 pp. $29.95Shopping For Faith:  American Religion and the New Millennium.By Richard Cimino and Don Lattin.Jossey-Bass. 240 pp. (Includes CD_ROM.) $25. These books have as . . . . Continue Reading »