The Christian Century

In American history, some lives have mattered; others have not. That difference fundamentally has been a racial one.

Readers familiar with Ross Douthat's column might expect his new book to be moderately conservative and carefully nuanced. It is neither.

Some two decades before Robert Bellah and his colleagues wrote the seminal 1985 book Habits of the Heart, which improved the public conversation about religion and society in the United States, Bellah penned a provocative essay called “Religious Evolution.” He has finally returned to that ambitious theme.