Iam a Catholic, but I married Protestant. My husband has steeped me in Protestant lore: Protestants get results. Protestants think ahead. Protestants save (Catholics spend). My Protestant in-laws had to endure our Catholic wedding, their faces rigid with polite distress as they took in the crucifix . . . . Continue Reading »
Stanley Hauerwas once told me that After Christendom? might be the systematic assembly of his thought for which friends and opponents have pressed him. In considerable part, the promise is fulfilled. The chapters of this book were drafted for a single set of lectures and work together in a . . . . Continue Reading »
By any reckoning, Tom and Geri Suma should be Democrats. Both come from Democratic families. Like many of his and his wife’s forebears, Tom started out on the line for Chrysler. Geri voted for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 primaries. And they still keep a bust of JFK in the living . . . . Continue Reading »
When we read every day of the affairs of some medieval institution—the papacy, the British Parliament, the rabbinate, or the Deir ul-Islam—we are looking into the Middle . . . . Continue Reading »
In the field of church-state jurisprudence, as is well known, legal scholars are generally divided between “strict separationists” and “accommodationists.” The former place a “broad interpretation” on the First Amendment’s prohibition of establishment, insisting on an absolute . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1975, Fritjof Capra, an Austrian émigré physicist and systems theorist, published The Tao of Physics, an effort to find parallels between scientific principles and the insights of Eastern spirituality. He later became a guru in his own right, specializing in ecology, in Berkeley, . . . . Continue Reading »
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, published in 1984, examined the debate on poverty in British thought from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776 through the mid-nineteenth century. The book was remarkable for its scope. It followed . . . . Continue Reading »
In her lively new study based upon fourteen schools of education across the country, Rita Kramer skewers two quite distinct forms of folly. One form of folly is the attempt by a few of the faculty whose classes she observed to make the classes occasions for political indoctrination so . . . . Continue Reading »
Will the flood of education books ever subside? Since 1983, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared us a “nation at risk,” there’s been a deluge. Wags have noted that we are menaced by a rising tide of education reports. Most fall into familiar categories. These . . . . Continue Reading »
On first reading of Culture Wars, James Hunter’s study of America’s social divisions, I was greatly impressed. On reading it again, I am still impressed, but there are points at which I wanted Hunter to go a bit further, to push home his central theme with a bit more fervor, and to . . . . Continue Reading »
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