I am at a Labor Day cookout in Finneytown, Ohio, and all the food has been eaten. Kids run around the yard playing a messy game of tee-ball as the sun dips below the horizon. Fluorescent pink plastic balls and bats fly everywhere. The adults sit lazily, and talk turns from mild state-of-the-nation . . . . Continue Reading »
Anyone interested in improving relations between men and women today and tomorrow must proceed by taking a page from yesterday. For today’s tale regarding manhood and womanhood is, alas, both too brief and hardly edifying. True, as they multiply taboos on speech and gesture, our sexual harassment . . . . Continue Reading »
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by edward j. larson basic, 318 pages, $25, $14.95 If there are moments in history when “the road not taken” might have changed the course of events, the famous “Monkey Trial,” held in Dayton, . . . . Continue Reading »
In a famous passage from Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead gives this counsel to scholars in the various historical disciplines: “Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which [controversialists] feel it necessary explicitly to defend.” More . . . . Continue Reading »
Moral philosophers are caught in a peculiar paradox these days. On the one hand, their field is flourishing: No longer intimidated by the logical positivists (who denied truth to moral assertions except as expressions of likes and dislikes), thinkers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and . . . . Continue Reading »
Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases that Define the Debate over Church and State terry eastland november 1995, eerdmans, $31.50For all their concern about the rise of anti-democrats in post-Soviet Russia, when it comes to the decisive excellence of the American regime our . . . . Continue Reading »
Every two or three years, at a small, elite New England university, I offer a graduate-level course on “Nature Writing.” The students, as you might guess, exhibit a keen interest in birds, blossoms, bugs, and bears. Despite shared tastes, the composition of the class is impressively diverse, a . . . . Continue Reading »
Battleground: One Mother's Crusade, The Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of our Classrooms by stephen bates poseidon press, 365 pages, $24 The 1983 protest by a group of parents in Hawkins County, Tennessee, against certain stories and themes in the public school reading . . . . Continue Reading »
Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education by gerald graff norton, 214 pages, $19.95 Although he does not mention James Davison Hunter’s book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America , Gerald Graff might be taking up the challenge of Hunter’s final . . . . Continue Reading »
Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America by mark r. schwehn oxford university press, 143 pages, $19.95 I am a teacher of undergraduates at a major research university. I am also the mother of two recent college graduates. From both inside and out, I am keenly aware of the . . . . Continue Reading »
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