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The claim is often made that media and intellectual elites in the U.S. are thoroughly secular and are uncomprehending when it comes to religion. How many times have you heard someone cite Peter Berger’s witticism “If India is the most religious country in the world, and Sweden the least religious, then America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes”?
It’s a great line, but the reality is more complicated, both in the media and the university.
Theolog readers might like to check out Warren Goldstein's relatively new blog. Goldstein is the chair of the history department at the University of Hartford. He's written an excellent book about baseball in American and a fine biography of William Sloane Coffin. Goldstein is committed to blogging about the liberal arts, liberal politics, liberal religion and, of course, baseball. His recent piece in defense of Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, will certainly kick up some dust.
A comment that I overheard after worship Sunday made me wonder if my 350-member Midwestern small-town congregation is the last church still experiencing skirmishes over music styles. Have other churches broken through the contemporary/traditional impasse and come out of it with a music program of integrity characterized by a variety of styles? Or are most, like us, still floating in an unhappy purgatory between musical poles?
I was surprised when California Senator Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat, rescinded an award she’d given to Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). After awarding Elkarra with a “certificate of achievement” in November, Boxer announced that she’d “made a mistake.”
By Meg E. Cox
I live in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, one of the most ethnically and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods in the country. Lately hundreds of families are being forced out by gentrification: rents go up, then people are evicted so the buildings can be redeveloped as condos. The condo buyers as a group are much whiter and wealthier than the residents who preceded them.
By Timothy Larsen
Is
it just because I’m an evangelical, or is the letter an undervalued theological
genre?
By Jason Byassee
One of the reasons we began Theolog was to have a venue in which to respond when blogstorms erupted over material in the Christian Century. A ministorm indeed erupted over “Misusing Jesus: How the church divorces Jesus from Judaism” in the December 26 issue, our excerpt of Amy-Jill Levine’s new book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco).
What happens when a grant foundation works both to integrate science and religion, and also to address each in depth? The Templeton Foundation has tried hard to do just that, and has poured enormous resources into the effort. But as John Dart reports, some have called the foundation an advocate for Intelligent Design—and Templeton is not happy about it.
By Lillian Daniel
Why it is that people eat food in church that they wouldn’t eat anywhere else? My ecclesiastical food habits go back to early childhood, when I wasn’t allowed to drink Kool-Aid at home, except during my birthday parties. On those occasions I waited eagerly as my mother combined cupfuls of pure sugar and one tiny slim packet of neon-colored flavoring to make a pitcher of that utterly nonnutritious cocktail.
Shannon Jung’s Sharing Food: Christian Practices for Enjoyment (Fortress) reminds me anew of the importance of eating in a sustainable way. The U.S. produces 500 unnecessary calories for every man, woman and child in this country every day, yet we have some 35 million people who are "food-insecure," that is, hungry.
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