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June/July Letters

Defending Kagan One can, of course, differ with the thesis of Donald Kagan’s Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, but to suggest (as the April editorial, “How Democracy Came About and How It Might Be Sustained,” does) that the work has anything in common with . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

Theonomy: A Reformed Critique edited by William S. Barker and W. Robert Godfrey Zondervan, 413 pages, $15.95  Certainly one of the more interesting religious stories of recent years has been the attraction of growing numbers of evangelical Christians to a variation of Reformed . . . . Continue Reading »

Evangelicals and Politics

The Scattered Voice: Christians at Odds in the Public Square by James W. Skillen Zondervan, 225 pages In the minds of many people, American evangelicalism is closely identified with right-wing politics. In reality, the political beliefs of American evangelicals are far more varied than is evident . . . . Continue Reading »

The God of the Philosophers

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 »

Not the Worst of Times—Or the Best

The First Universal Nation: Leading Indicators and Ideas About the Surge of America in the 1990sBy Ben J. WattenbergThe Free Press, 418 pages, $22.95 Ben Wattenberg is America’s most prominent optimist. He is notoriously reassuring about the condition of what has in his mind become “the first . . . . Continue Reading »

Religion and Public Life

Under God: Religion and American Politicsby Garry WillsSimon and Schuster, 445 pages, $24.95 Garry Wills is an indefatigable iconoclast, and the icons that have felt the sting of his wit are as diverse in time as in form. They include ideas like the facile notion of Lockean hegemony in the . . . . Continue Reading »

The WCC at Canberra: Which Spirit?

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 Advent of Literary Science

It is now more than thirty years since C. P. Snow’s Cambridge Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” popularized the notion of a dangerous rift between the literary and scientific world views. Snow put the blame on the pessimistic, anti-social, and politically silly . . . . Continue Reading »

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