President Clinton’s decision to lift the ban against homosexuals in the military has opened a deep cultural divide in American public opinion that extends beyond the immediate issue to questions of morality, convention, and social order. Judging from the vituperation on the editorial pages and the . . . . Continue Reading »
From Synagogue to Church: Public Services and Offices in the Earliest Christian Communities by james tunstead burtchaell cambridge university press, 375 pages, $59.95 In the tired debate whether the priesthood is of the esse or the bene esse of the Church James Burtchaell offers a provocative . . . . Continue Reading »
It is now well over three years since the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Scenes of Polish workers carrying Lech Walesa triumphantly on their shoulders, of students dancing on top of the Berlin Wall, and of throngs cheering Vaclav Havel in Wenceslas Square have been replaced by sickening images . . . . Continue Reading »
Ten years ago I had an experience that made me vividly aware of the two worlds with which the practitioner of the critical study of the Bible inevitably deals. Reading applications for the doctoral program whose faculty I had only recently joined, I was struck by the frequency on the . . . . Continue Reading »
Like millions of other Americans we cringed more than once at the God-talk of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and others at the Republican convention and in the subsequent campaign. President Bush was little better with his public complaint that the Democratic platform omitted “three simple letters: . . . . Continue Reading »
By any reckoning, Tom and Geri Suma should be Democrats. Both come from Democratic families. Like many of his and his wife’s forebears, Tom started out on the line for Chrysler. Geri voted for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 primaries. And they still keep a bust of JFK in the living . . . . Continue Reading »
It may just have been a throwaway line, a presumed witticism, to which he gave little thought; in which case he is convicted merely of intellectual sloppiness. But it may also have been seriously meant, a revelation of his considered judgment; in which case he offers us a window into the blindness . . . . Continue Reading »
Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourseby Mary Ann GlendonFree Press, 288 pages, $22.95 One of the dubious achievements of American legal philosophers and academicians concerned with “rights” is to have emptied jurisprudence of the element of prudence. Constitutional . . . . Continue Reading »
Liberalism must jettison the dead-end politics of . . . . 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 »
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