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Pluralism is often perceived as a threat to faith, associated with relativism and a loss of religious substance. I take a contrary position. It seems to me that pluralism...

Rudolf Bultmann, the German New Testament scholar whose program for the “demythologization” of the Gospel provoked a storm of controversy in the years after World War II, wrote in...

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God ?by T. M. Luhrmann Knopf, 464 pages, $28.95 n The methods of anthropology were developed in the early...

Richard used to put up cartoons in his bathroom. One, which stayed there for some time, showed a Viking ship arriving on a beach where people were dancing and...

It has been more than a century since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. The prophecy was widely accepted as referring to an alleged fact about increasing disbelief in...

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...

The title question has been asked frequently in recent years, both within and outside the field. I think that it can be answered rather easily: sociology has fallen victim...

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...

Christian conservatives generally subscribe to two strongly held propositions: that a return to Christian values is necessary if the moral confusion of our time is to be overcome, and...

The following is a report filed by Albert Goodwill, an American journalist, after the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg (an event depicted in the well-known film Triumph of...

One of the (regrettably few) benefits of growing old is the way in which incidents in one’s own biography intersect with phases of what passes for world history. I...

After a thirty-year hiatus, chain gangs are back. Alabama, fittingly enough, has been first to reinstitute this great Southern tradition. But this is no longer an exclusively Southern phenomenon....

In a recent issue of the Spectator , the spunky British conservative magazine, there were two articles on aspects of the military culture of the United Kingdom. One, by...

The other day a colleague of mine, who came to America from Russia via Israel, told me a story about her son who is in the eighth grade in...

The readers of First Things , I know, are eagerly awaiting further reports by this writer from the wilder shores of American feminism and other battlefields of this country’s...