As we read about the rise of the spiritual but not religious, how do we respond? Do we think of it as a threat? A challenge? Or do we resonate with the category?
We could avoid all sorts of nasty fights, Stephen Jay Gould argues, if we would stop expecting science to provide validating evidence for religious dogmas or biblical events. Nor ought we to turn to religion to resolve questions of a properly scientific nature. He wants no more natural theology, no more "anthropic principle," no more attempts to find scientific confirmation for religious beliefs, and no more fundamentalist "creation science." In short, "science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven."
The U.S. Supreme Court's opinions about the relationship between religion and the state have been increasingly separationist, argues Phillip Hammond, a distinguished sociologist of religion and contributor to the so-called civil religion discussion. Although the nation "began as a de facto Protestant society," it has since the close of the Civil War moved toward greater and greater government neutrality not only toward differing religions but also toward the difference between religion and irreligion. This is as it should be, Hammond thinks. Behind the Constitution, he contends, is a "constitutional faith," and separationism, rightly understood, is its legal or judicial expression.
All the lonely people, where do they all come from? That question from “Eleanor Rigby” might serve as the epigraph for the works of Douglas Coupland. Coupland is the Canadian writer who burst on the scene in 1991 with Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thereby coining the term for his generation.
Books
The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1: Origins to Constantine
Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young, eds.
The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 8: World Christianities, c. 1815–c. 1914.
Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley, eds.
The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 9: World Christianities, c. 1914–c. 2000
Hugh McLeod, ed.
A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief Under Theodosius II (408-450)
Fergus Millar
God's War: A New History of the Crusades
Christopher Tyerman
Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin's Geneva, Volume 1: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage
John Witte Jr. and Robert M. Kingdon, eds.
Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada: The Colbys of Carrollcroft
Marguerite Van Die
Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World
Jon Sensbach
Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University
Albert Howard
The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970
Michael Gauvreau
Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War
As the Associated Press story had it, a Greyhound passenger lost it when the bus driver and several others on the bus asked him to douse his cigarette. “No smoking” was the rule on the Miami-bound bus, just as it has come to be the rule in most confined and many open spaces everywhere.
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