My mother in an unusually arch moment once proffered a solution to all the church-state debates about Christmas cr ches on public squares Take the clothes off the Wise Men she said That way they could get an arts award Jane Alexander former head of the National Endowment for the Arts likes w

Wags in the divinity school at the University of Chicago used to love retelling the joke about someone who tries to call Professor Martin Marty rsquo s office and gets the following response from Marty rsquo s secretary quot Could you hold on for about a minute and a half while Professor Marty fin

The debate over globalization is heating up not only in the streets of Seattle and Washington D C and the halls of Congress but among academics journalists and writers on public affairs A major contribution is A Future Perfect written by two veteran reporters for The Economist As is to be ex

It could be argued that fundamentalism is a serious contemporary problem that affects all aspects of society and will likely influence all cultures for the foreseeable future Such is in fact Karen Armstrong rsquo s assumption Her book makes an attempt to understand the development of fundamentali

O K post-Christian we rsquo ve read our Nietzsche postmodern the MLA insists on it postcolonial goes without saying post-structuralist ho-hum but post-cultural Can Christopher Clausen an English professor at Penn State be serious Indeed he can First assume that culture in the old s

Living in an age of partisan politics one has need of a reminder that there was a time when cooperation and compromise defined our country rsquo s political life Irwin and Debi Unger call us back to examine that period of our country rsquo s history in LBJ A Life Not a sentimental or romanticize