Various

Religion in the Public Square I found a number of the statements in the symposium “Judaism and American Public Life” (March) thoughtful and provocative. An important distinction, however, was left undrawn or at least inadequately drawn both by the classical separationists and by those . . . . Continue Reading »

Darwin on Trial by Phillip E. Johnson Regnery Gateway, 195 pages, $19.95 A calm, comprehensive, and utterly devastating critique of evolution elevated to the level of religious faith. Johnson of the University of California, Berkeley, brings a lawyer’s keen mind to dissecting the arguments . . . . Continue Reading »

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 »

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 theology known as . . . . Continue Reading »

Right On about Gulf War George Weigel’s “The Churches & War in the Gulf” (March) was splendid. It is quite simply the best exposition of the subject I have yet seen. My congratulations. Charles Krauthammer Washington, D.C. Hook in Heaven? I very much appreciated Michael . . . . Continue Reading »

The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to Metaphysics by Richard Morris Prentice Hall, 244 pages, $18.95 What was happening, if anything, before there was time? And what does “before” mean in that sentence? Are physicists and cosmologists on the edge of producing a . . . . Continue Reading »

God & Man at College In George Marsden’s “The Soul of the American University” (January), he proposes two remedies for the decline in religious life in the university: the demand for a true pluralism and the building of an alternative higher educational system in . . . . Continue Reading »

Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism by Betty A. Deberg Fortress Press, 165 pages, $9.95 paper DeBerg of Valparaiso University makes the argument that the “first wave” of fundamentalism, around the turn of the century, is in fact the progenitor of . . . . Continue Reading »

Unfairly Reviewed? It is a pity that First Things has printed a review of my book Sham Pearls for Real Swine (January) that appears to attack me rather than deal with the issues my book raises. My book is not a continuation of my late father, Francis Schaeffer’s, work. Nor was it written out . . . . Continue Reading »

In the half-century now past, the dominant view among American Jews was that religion should be rigorously separated from public life. The more thoroughly secular the society, many thought, the safer it is for Jews. Those who, like Will Herberg, dissented from that view were in a very small . . . . Continue Reading »