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America’s Smiling God

From the April 2012 Print Edition

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God ?by T. M. Luhrmann Knopf, 464 pages, $28.95 The methods of anthropology were developed in the early years of the discipline, when its practitioners went to study so-called savages in exotic locales. In more recent . . . . Continue Reading »

Remembering Ivan Illich

From the March 2003 Print Edition

Ivan Illich died in Bremen on December 2, 2002 at the age of seventy-six. As a German friend of his put it: “God gave him a beautiful death.” Illich suddenly collapsed while at work in his study and died immediately. The New York Times obituary noted, quite correctly, that Illich’s influence . . . . Continue Reading »

Two Cheers for Class

From the June/July 1996 Print Edition

The human sciences in America are in a state of advanced and seemingly irreversible decay. One look at the programs for the annual meetings at which the practitioners of these disciplines gather suffices to convince one of this diagnosis. There are exceptions, of course. Here and there one finds . . . . Continue Reading »