Many retail stores depend on Christmas shopping for their survival. Economists tell us that the current uptick of this seasonal shopping is good news for the recovery from the recession. Christian clergy and secular culture critics tend to have a more sour view of these facts. The theological objection to the Christmas bonanza is neatly […]
Peter Berger
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Religion & Other Curiosities
December 28, 2010
December 22, 2010
Some Theologians Never Die—They Just Wait to be Googled.
From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, an unassuming and rather pedantic German scholar was at the center of passionate international debates in Protestant theology. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) was a well-known New Testament scholar. Bultmann was a professor at the University of Marburg, which was an important center for historical studies of religion and the […]
December 15, 2010
Afrobeat on a London Stage
I was in London last week, for a reason totally unrelated to the topic of this blog entry. Dr. Johnson famously observed that, if you are tired of London, you are tired of life. I tend to agree. Part of not being tired of life means, for me, savoring the rich offerings of the London […]
December 8, 2010
Am I My DNA?
On November 28, 2010, the National Catholic Reporter, the banner journal of liberal Catholicism, published a lengthy excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church, by Father Charles Curran. As the NCR editorial on that date put it, Curran “will forever drag a footnote along with him”, no matter what […]
December 1, 2010
Interfaith Kumbaya?
A few days before Thanksgiving The New York Times carried a brief report about a pre-holiday interfaith breakfast in Westchester County, the affluent suburban area just north of New York City. It was convened by Rabbi Mark Sameth, known as “the country-and-western rabbi”, and the Reverend Steven Phillips, a Methodist described as “a sort of […]
