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In the Oct. 8 New Republic, Alan Wolfe of Boston College reviews Head and Heart: American Christianities, the latest book by Garry Wills. The argument of Head and Heart, as condensed by Wolfe, should gladden the heart of anyone who has night sweats because of the Religious Right:
Every time President Bush speaks of his Christian faith, the mainstream media get all roiled up. Here’s how a 2003 story in The Christian Science Monitor began:
Paul Elie’s latest essay for The Atlantic, a 6,400-word report on the variety of political thinkers who cite the late Reinhold Niebuhr as their hero, starts off strong but spends too much time waist-deep in the big muddy of debates about the Iraq War.
The Amish are not known as easy interviews. In fact, many do not like to talk to journalists at all and, when they talk, they often speak German.
It’s almost the Gregorian chant of liberal religion, and you don’t need to attend many inquirer’s classes before hearing it: “We take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” Yet it’s usually the same people who talk the most about biblical literalism, as if it were a metastasizing cancer in American culture. By percentage, very few Americans engage in the sort of biblical interpretation that will deprive them of coffee in the morning or a blood transfusion in the emergency room.
This week brings two online discussions of the book God’s Harvard by Washington Post Style reporter Hanna Rosin. One discussion, on the Post‘s website, features questions from readers, with fairly predictable results. It’s a funny mix of Patrick Henry College alumni and people who are frightened by them.
As some GetReligion readers may know, my wife is a professional librarian at a public library in Anne Arundel County, Md. Thus, it is no surprise — with a librarian married to a journalist — that whenever we move into a house the first thing we do is build about 18 to 20 feet worth of bookshelves, to add to the free-standing units that we already have.
Maybe it’s appropriate to write about this on the morning of Sept. 11. How different would things be today if the terrorist attacks of six years ago had never happened?
