The British journal The Tablet, which I find very useful for what goes on in the Roman Catholic Church, came out with a “Pentecost edition” on May 18, 2013 (the feast was on May 19). Pentecost was the event recounted in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit was poured out over a gathering […]

The historian Philip Jenkins, who is an erudite and insightful observer of contemporary religion, writes a column for The Christian Century. In the issue of May 15, 2013, he has a piece reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the attack by agents of the US government on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, during […]

The media have been full these days with news about the seemingly inexorable victories (at least in America and Europe) of the sexual liberation movements that began over fifty years ago. Same-sex marriage is being legislated in a lengthening list of American states and European nations. The ruling coalition in Germany is threatened with dissolution […]

Peter Berger is away on travel this week. Regular posting will resume later this month. 

In its May 2013 issue, First Things published an article by Edward Shapiro under the title “The Crisis of Conservative Judaism”. The last phrase does not refer to conservatism in general, but to the specific branch of Judaism that goes under that name. As is well known, American Judaism is divided into three denominations—Orthodox (which […]

There are events that are so surreal that they almost inevitably evoke religious language. This was certainly the case with the attack on the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, so it is not surprising that such language erupted in its wake. But this particular event makes religious reactions especially appropriate, more so than would […]

On April 4, 2013 the New York Times carried a story about a group of Dominican friars in Ireland.  Contrary to the development in other Catholic monastic orders, these Dominicans had decided to continue wearing the traditional habit of white tunic and black cloaks (because of which Dominicans have been known as Black Friars). The […]

The classical German sociologist Max Weber (who has been an icon in my professional ideology) distinguished various types of authority in his theory of politics. The modern world, he proposed, is dominated by what he called “legal-rational authority”. Its typical institutional expression is bureaucracy. Those who exercise power must be able to justify why their […]

On March 21, 2013, Law and Religion Headlines, the very useful online newsletter from Emory University, carried a summary of an interview on the BBC with Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury. He is an interesting and appealing figure. Born in 1956, he had an elite education at Eton and Cambridge, then an impressive […]

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its annual meeting on March 14-16, 2013, in Washington. Widely reported on in the media, its main agenda was fiscal conservatives and social conservatives assuring each other that they could collaborate in reviving the Republican Party despite their different emphases on issues, respectively, north and south of the […]