On April 8, 1966, a five-thousand-word cover story appeared in Time magazine, sending the country into a panic over a group of theologians few had heard of then and nobody remembers now. Paul van Buren, Thomas Altizer, and William Hamilton are forgotten. The cover, however, remains memorable. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Why was it once virtually impossible not to believe in God, while today many of us find this not only easy, but inescapable?” The question is Charles Taylor’s, and his nine-hundred-page answer has arguably been the academic event of the decade. Seven years after its publication, A . . . . Continue Reading »
Karl Barth was the greatest theologian since the Reformation, and his work is today a dead letter. This is an extraordinary irony. Barth aspired to free Christian theology from restrictive modern habits of mind but in the end preserved the most damaging assumptions of the ideas he sought to . . . . Continue Reading »
“When given the option,” Garrison Keillor tells us, “Lutherans will always downsize .” So far as I can tell, personal “downsizing” is the only way to make sense of what Mark Noll fairly calls the “remarkably unremarkable” history of American Lutherans. Such a . . . . Continue Reading »
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