This is a review found in the NY Times, but I thought it fit with the book review this week:
The Bush era was a difficult time for liberal religion in America. The events of 9/11 were not exactly an advertisement for the compatibility of faith and reason, faith and modernity, or faith and left-of-center politics. Nor was the domestic culture war that blazed up in their wake, which lent a “with us or against us” quality to nearly every God-related controversy. For many liberals, the only choices seemed to be secularism or fundamentalism, the new atheism or the old-time religion, Richard Dawkins or George W. Bush.
But now the wheel has turned, and liberal believers can breathe easier. Bush has retired to Texas, and his successor in the White House is the very model of a modern liberal Christian. Religious conservatism seems diminished and dispirited. The polarizing issues of the moment are health care and deficits, not abstinence education or intelligent design. And the new atheists seem to have temporarily run out of ways to call believers stupid.
……………
Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.
Book Review – ‘The Case for God,’ by Karen Armstrong – Review – NYTimes.com.
October 6th, 2009 7:04 pm
Amen to at least the last paragraph!
October 6th, 2009 7:30 pm
I wouldn’t put god in a case. I’d put him in a satchel. Or, like, a man-purse.
October 6th, 2009 7:47 pm
Not sure what ya mean mate?
October 7th, 2009 3:44 pm
Just applying a (vaguely?) humorous pun.