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 […]
Peter Berger
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Religion & Other Curiosities
October 26, 2011
October 19, 2011
German Christians and the Middle East
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 […]
October 12, 2011
A Long String of Atrocities
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 […]
October 5, 2011
What's in a Name?
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 […]
