At the World’s Parliament of Religions on September 11, 1893, a 30-year-old monk named Swami Vivekananda stood confidently on the platform. In part from inner spiritual conviction, but also

In today’s intellectual climate, it is refreshing to find a book on the relationship between Christianity and politics that is neither a reactionary daydream nor a breathless polemic against

What would the essayist Lionel Trilling make of today’s American conservative movement? While Trilling would certainly be critical of what he called “irritable mental gestures,” it would be

The trouble with realism is that it’s so unrealistic. Certainly that’s true of realism as a low-rent metaphysics or epistemology, but it’s true even of the word’s most common usages, as a

Religion is the subject of America’s oldest culture war. Since the early days of the republic, Americans have argued bitterly, although mostly peacefully, about when, how, and even whether

Toward the end of the 20th century, historian Mark Noll dilated on the “unobtrusiveness of Lutherans in America.” There was, in what Noll called a “superficial view from the outside,” little

It was not my idea to review a book on the history of Christian rock music, but in a few respects I do have some bona fides. For a couple of decades now, I have been a confessional Lutheran

Against the Revolution, the Gospel! This was the memorable slogan of not only a political party but also a broader social and spiritual movement that swept through the Netherlands in the

Hans Fiene is the pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Crestwood, Mo., and the creator of Lutheran Satire, a multimedia project intended to teach the Christian faith through humor