With Liberty and Justice for Whom? The Recent Evangelical Debate Over Capitalism by Craig M. Gay, foreword by Peter L. Berger Eerdmans, 276 pages, $19.95 Recently the local news reported on a Wisconsin environmental initiative. School children were sent into prairie fields to gather seeds from the . . . . Continue Reading »
On the morning of March 23, 1982, a group of young Guatemalan army officers brought a retired army general, Efrain Rios Montt, to power in a coup d’etat. Rios Montt, an evangelical Protestant and member of the Word Church, was president of a Catholic country in Catholic Latin America. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Exploring the influence of televangelism on American religion in his book The Struggle for America’s Soul, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow presents a typical, though hypothetical, case study: Mabel Miller. Mabel lives alone, thousands of miles from her family. She grew up in a . . . . Continue Reading »
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice has been having quite a run through the Garden of Live Flowers. “I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!” she says. “There ought to be some men moving about somewhere—and so there are!” Alice gets excited . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1802 a flamboyant Baptist preacher named John Leland presented a twelve-hundred pound “mammoth cheese” to Thomas Jefferson at a White House ceremony. Molded in a cider press from the milk of nine hundred cows, this phenomenal creation bore the motto “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to . . . . Continue Reading »
From time to time, a set of concerns reaches something like a critical mass. Familiar discontents vaguely felt turn into more focused anxieties, and then, all of a sudden it seems, a passel of scholars arrives at a similar analysis of what has gone so thoroughly wrong—and some similar ideas of . . . . Continue Reading »
Saddam Hussein’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait may have thrown the world economy into confusion, but it has revived one flagging and undeniably American industry: dispensationalist pop-apocalyptic. Largely under the influence of former steamboat captain Hal Lindsey, a large sector of American . . . . Continue Reading »
Since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the prospects for peaceful change in South Africa have seemingly improved. Whether those prospects are realized, and whether South Africa will join the family of democratic nations, will depend in important ways on a factor almost always overlooked by . . . . Continue Reading »
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subcultureby randall balmeroxford university press, 246 pages, $19.95 While familiarity and education both breed contempt for things like traditional religion, they also, especially in combination, can spawn interesting insights into . . . . Continue Reading »
The 1980s may well be looked back upon as a decade of intellectual reformation in the so-called North-South debate. A burst of revisionist thinking has affected recent discussions of Third World economic development and may offer a harbinger of better policies vis-a-vis the world’s poor. There . . . . Continue Reading »