The Roman Catholic Church has had difficulties with modernity for a long time. In 1861 Pope Pius IX (famous for his Syllabus of Errors, an exhaustive compendium of modern heresies) made matters very clear in a famous “allocution”, which rejected the notion that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to […]

We are awash in movements. The Arab Spring is one long series of movements, like a row of candles, each one igniting the next one in the row—Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, then back to Benghazi, and so on across the Middle East. Even Israel has caught a spark, as protesters camped out on Dizengoff Boulevard in […]

The cross has been the foremost symbol of Christianity for so long that we easily forget that it was an instrument of execution. Subjects of the Roman Empire at the time could hardly forget this, and the spectacle of a religion using this symbol must have been shocking indeed, if not downright obscene. To achieve […]

The Protestant Academy in Bad Boll is an influential think-tank located near Stuttgart, in southwest Germany. I worked there for a year in my youth, an experience which greatly influenced my thinking about the role of the church in a modern democracy—an issue of great urgency in the formative years of the Federal Republic. The […]

A few days ago I was with a group of people when the topic of the Armenian genocide came up. The immediate reason for the topic to come up was the action of several European legislatures to declare that the events of 1915 in Turkey should indeed be called a genocide (there has been a […]

Preamble: What follows is not an argument for the truth of religion. It is an exercise in the phenomenology of religion—that is, a description of what the phenomenon of religion is all about. It is not an exercise in theology—that would be a reasoned proposition that the phenomenon is true. Anyone, atheists included, could engage […]

The issue of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has been festering now for about two decades. It shows no signs of going away. The issue is based on real facts, more of which keep coming out. At the same time, the issue is fanned by a secular media culture which relishes it with a good […]

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. Coincidentally, in a recent issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Habermas is on a […]

There are three Christian journals that I peruse regularly—National Catholic Reporter (liberal Catholic), Christian Century (liberal Protestant) and Christianity Today (conservative Protestant). The adjective “liberal” in the first two journals refers both to their theological and political orientation; Christianity Today is theologically conservative, but has no single political line. The three journals usually appear in […]

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is no longer content to preside over what many still regard as the world’s greatest newspaper. (I don’t, but I read it every day, not because of its pervasive liberal bias, but because it continues to offer the best international coverage of any American newspaper.)  Keller […]