A friend of mine, more radical and pessimistic than I, claims that it is illegal to be a Christian in the United States today. Though I find that assessment overstated, not to say hysterical, it can hardly be doubted that public expressions of Christianity have, in the last several decades, been . . . . Continue Reading »
Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truthby Mortimer J. AdlerMacMillan, 162 pages, $18.95 For many moderns, “truth in religion” means little more than what is deemed important for the psychological and communal needs of individuals or religious communities. Religion is . . . . Continue Reading »
In the theological world, Liberation theologies express the yearning for human wholeness . . . . They reread the Bible and reinterpret Christian tradition and theology from their experience of oppression and liberation. This must be the time we have to reread the Bible from the perspective of birds, . . . . Continue Reading »
The interfaith dialogue between Christians and Jews has become such a familiar feature of contemporary religious life that it is hard to imagine a time when it was virtually unheard of. Yet this dialogue has existed in self-conscious form only since the end of World War II. Jewish Perspectives . . . . Continue Reading »
If the Vanderbilt transition from Methodist to neuter exhibits a typical pattern of academic secularization, what we will find at the root of these events is a sponsoring church that is nonchalant about its burden: one that wishes to be the patron of a college or university without being its . . . . Continue Reading »
Christianity is an inherently missionary faith. According to the Gospel of Matthew, the last word of the resurrected Lord to his disciples was this: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to . . . . Continue Reading »
Our subject is one of those peculiar phenomena taken for granted in the contemporary world but which from an historical perspective seem anomalous. The phenomenon is that the huge numbers of Protestants in the United States support almost no distinctively Christian program in higher education other . . . . Continue Reading »
It was in the early 1960s that my late revered teacher, Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, became the first major Jewish theologian in America to enter into dialogue with Christian theologians on a high theological level. Once during that time, when I was part of a small group of students who . . . . Continue Reading »