Martin E. Marty
Bow-tied liberal Protestant?
During the decades that I've been writing this column I've had two self-imposed rules: Never engage in literary feuds, since they are odious and boring; and never defend yourself, here or in a lett...
Say it with color
Crayola's recent announcement that it will change the name of its Indian red crayon to avoid misunderstandings about the color's origin (it comes from a reddish-brown pigment found in India) made m...
Fallibilities
Readers supply us with more items for this column than we can acknowledge or print, but we do our best to sneak these signs of human fallibility in among our weighty pronouncements....
Leaving a landmark
As we moved out of the Old Colony building a few days ago, I remembered having written about the place back in 1977 when it—along with the Fisher building to the north and the Manhattan building to...
Growing in the Life of Faith, by Craig Dykstra
Sadly, astonishingly, suicidally—pick your adverb—mainstream Protestants, Roman Catholics and not a few evangelicals have for decades neglected Christian education and nurture....
Attracting attention
Tina Brown, celebrity editor of Talk, previously of the New Yorker, was welcoming writer Alexander Chancellor at a dinner party in New York....
Not-so-new age
Chesterton said that when people stop believing in God they do not believe in nothing, they believe in everything. That dictum is well illustrated in postsecular America....
The inner history
Sidney E. Mead died this summer at age 94. With Sidney Ahlstrom he dominated the study of American religious history a generation or two ago....
A good value
In his influential Theory of Justice John Rawls speaks of a "difference principle," a way of legitimizing social differences....
Thank the Creator for creators
Question: who are Crombie Taylor, Lyndon Lyon, Paul Sacher, John Tigrett, Waldo Semon, Ed Peterson and James Blades? Do you recognize any of their names? Let's look around us....
Law without gospel
The Ten Commandments may soon, by decree, be posted on public school walls. Burnt into wood or graven as images in stone, or merely inked, they will contribute to American moral security....
Immaculate deception
Knowledge of the finer points of theology is neither irrelevant nor a luxury. Lack of that knowledge can entail great risk and expense....
Callingness
Our dictionaries are too small. We do not have nearly enough words to name the realities around us. My 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary and two supplements are too spare....
Increasing reverence
The Rev. Seminarian Chad Foster wrote a letter to U.S. News & World Report (April 5) and reverently signed it as just described. The usage was new to me....
Governing the body
The Honorable Jesse Ventura is the Lutheran governor of the country's most Lutheran state, Minnesota. Pamela Hill Nettleton wrote a short profile on him in the Lutheran (March)....