A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation by wade clark roof harpercollins, 311 pages, $20 Beyond Establishment: Protestant Identity in a Post-Protestant Age ed. jackson carroll and wade clark roof westminster/john knox press, 361 pages, $19.99 It is well known that . . . . Continue Reading »
One sometimes gets the clearest sense that a movement is in deep trouble by considering not the weakest statements of its case, but the very strongest. So it is that sympathetic readers may come to deeply melancholy conclusions as to the state of liberal Protestantism after reading Peter Berger’s . . . . Continue Reading »
To the extent that Lutherans are noticed at all by non-Lutherans in America, impressions can be wildly contradictory. From one perspective, they can look like mildly exotic ethnics—sort of like the Mennonites, only more numerous. Thus it is possible for interested outsiders to smile . . . . Continue Reading »
Garfield Bromley Oxnam (1891–1963) was a bishop of the Methodist Church, and a cover subject of Time, though it’s hard to imagine the two going together today. Billy Graham can fill the Sheep Meadow of Central Park with listeners, and John Cardinal O’Connor can fill Fifth Avenue in front of . . . . Continue Reading »
Iam a member of the United Methodist Church and a graduate student of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. One might ask why a United Methodist would go to a Roman Catholic university to study philosophy. The answer is, I am at Notre Dame because I cannot study philosophy at a Methodist . . . . Continue Reading »
We are a month late in noting an anniversary that should not pass unnoted. 1981 witnessed the launching of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), a venture that was to profoundly shake and partially reshape the social postures of mainline/oldline Protestantism. One might argue that IRD . . . . Continue Reading »
A history of the relation of sacramental theology and practice to Western intellectual and cultural history has yet to be written. The notion that such a history would be worth writing might seem quaint in our day, but there are hints that the enterprise would be a fruitful one. What, for example, . . . . Continue Reading »
It is a longstanding commonplace in Christian thought that Protestantism distinguishes its moral theology from that of Roman Catholicism by its rejection of natural law. The idea of natural law has long formed the spinal column of Catholic social teaching. Modern Protestantism, by contrast, has no . . . . Continue Reading »
The Good Societyby Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen,William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. TiptonKnopf, 333 pages, $25 The Good Society is a sequel to these authors’ celebrated book, Habits of the Heart. Habits was a cultural event—an “academic” book that became . . . . Continue Reading »
Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalismby George M. Marsden Eerdmans, 206 pages, $12.95 Evangelicalism and fundamentalism continue to represent a vital and flourishing sector of American religion, one often at war with the American cultural elite and latterly much engaged in politics. For . . . . Continue Reading »
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