Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic. But in the process the church in America became American - or, as Noll puts it, "because the churches had done so much to make America, they could not escape living with what they had made."

As a result Americans continue to maintain a stubborn belief in a god, but the god they believe in turns out to be the American god. To know or worship that god does not require that a church exist because that god is known through the providential establishment of a free people.

This is a presumption shared by the religious right as well as the religious left in America. Both assume that America is the church.

Reasonable discourse on all things culture and Christianity.

Early Church.org.uk: An Internet Resource for Studying the First Centuries of Christianity

he Other Journal is a online quarterly journal that aims to create space for Christian interdisciplinary reflection, exploration, and expression. Attempting to remain a notch or two more popular than the typical scholarly journal and a notch or two more scholarly than the typical popular magazine, our goal is to provide our readers with provocative, challenging and insightful Christian commentary on current social issues, political events, cultural trends, and pop phenomena.

Each issue of The Other Journal is organized around a particular theme, and includes sections dedicated to:

* Examination :: articles, essays, and interviews
* Imagination :: creative nonfiction, personal essays, short stories, and poetry
* Creation :: art exhibits
* Perspective :: personal essays that center on an experience of literature, film, or music
* Praxis :: practical applications of theological themes

My name is Wesley Hill.

This is my commonplace book and sometime-journal.

The principles are tiresomely belabored, but the specific policy recommendations don't follow straightforwardly from the principles. How do we get from "We must be good stewards of creation" to "Our church needs to invest in the Eden Conservancy Project"?

It seems to me that one way we get there is through deep and serious empirical study, so that we can determine with some reasonable degree of confidence whether the Eden Conservancy Project—and the general conservation strategy it represents—really is a good way for those of us who want to care for God's creation to invest our resources.

But, of course, any answer to such empirical questions will depend on how well we have formulated the questions—how well we understand our goals and desires, how well we understand our concepts of care and conservation. This is another way of saying that we also must get from general biblical principles or commandments to specific practices through theology.

Theology and the New Physics [1] | Uncertainty

Of course, neither Giberson nor Miller nor anyone else has said that the new atheists have it in their power to make creationism disappear — this is yet another straw man — but leaving that aside, I would have Jerry note that Dawkins’s ability to convince people of “the reality and the power of evolution” was greatest when he wrote books that, with great clarity and verve, simply explained evolutionary theory and the core ideas behind it. When Dawkins took seriously the description of his own chair at Oxford — in “the public understanding of science” — he won a lot of people over. It wasn’t until he confused the public understanding of science with the public repudiation of religion that he began to alienate far more people than he convinced.

Pastors and theologians today could still learn a great deal from Updike’s fiction. Just think of the Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach in Rabbit, Run (1960), a deeply Barthian minister who utters this thunderous denouncement of pastoral work – in conversation with another minister, he asks: “Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. ”

So the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason--only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful--those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths--fall into the "incompatible" category.

Despite the active anti-intellectualism of the Communist regime that controlled Poland for the majority of his life, Heller established himself as an international figure among cosmologists and physicists through his prolific writings–he has more than 30 books and nearly 400 papers to his credit–on such topics as the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics, multiverse theories and their limitations, geometric methods in relativistic physics such as noncommutative geometry, and the philosophy and history of science.

Simultaneously, as a Catholic priest, Heller surmounted the anti-religious dictates of Polish authorities, opening new vistas for the faithful by positioning the traditional Christian way of viewing the universe within a broader cosmological context and by initiating what can be justly termed the "theology of science."