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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

On November 13, 2010, there were two stories about religion, separated by four pages, in The New York Times. The first, filed by Laurie Goodstein (who reports regularly on religion), dealt with a conference of Roman Catholic bishops on procedures of exorcism. The other story, by Mark Oppenheimer (another regular Times reporter), told of an […]

In the current issue of The Christian Century there are three items about Lutherans. One is about the economic difficulties incurred by congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) who have left that denomination to protest its decision in August 2009 to allow non-celibate gay clergy and to bless same-sex unions. Thus far […]

In the book which has by now become an important point of reference, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington developed the thesis that after the demise of the Cold War conflicts would be between civilizations rather than ideologies. The thesis has been hotly discussed ever since, mostly unfavorably. I […]

I don’t know what occurs to the average newspaper reader if one observes that 2010 marks a centennial. Whatever happened in 1910? Some international incident anticipating World War I? A revolution in China? As I’ve just discovered, the first congress of German sociologists? Hardly. But among Evangelicals the centenary significance is clear: A hundred years […]

At the time of writing the outcome of a national election in Brazil is still undecided. The candidate of the left-of-center party, endorsed by the enormously popular President Lula (prevented by the constitution from running for another term) was way ahead of her right-of-center opponent in the polls. She was expected to win easily in […]

In its issue of October 19 The Christian Century, house organ of well-meaning mainline Protestants, reported on a summit meeting at the United Nations of religious leaders and other humanitarians on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the so-called UN Millenium Development Goals. The latter constituted a program for “the eradication of extreme poverty […]

I spent all of last week in Frankfurt at the one-hundreth anniversary of the German Society for Sociology, giving the opening lecture on Monday and participating in a seminar on Friday. A great honor to be sure, but on accepting the invitation I had not fully visualized the dubious thrill of spending an entire week […]