Steven Nadler: For the adherents of these codified superstitions, life is a state of “bondage,” coerced obedience in body and in mind. They live in a state of “deception” and are prevented (sometimes by force) from exercising free judgment. True worship has been replaced by flattery of God, the pursuit of knowledge by servitude to [...]
Prowled By A Babel Of Peoples
Russell Shorto: We are used to thinking of American beginnings as involving thirteen English colonies — to thinking of American history as an English root onto which, over time, the cultures of many other nations were grafted to create a new species of society that has become a multiethnic model for progressive societies around the [...]
The Merciless Discipline Of The Depression
Barry Werth: Beecher exalted workingmen; it was the unions and communists that he despised. Flush from his triumphal return to the national stage, he withstood the predictable scorn of the strikers and their sympathizers, who thought his widely reprinted “bread and water” sermon sanctimonious and hypocritical — profoundly unchristian. More lacerating were the barbs of [...]
Two Split Continents
Richard Powers: Dr. Ressler refused to take part in my debates with the club creationist. Annie, even-tempered, devoid of suspicion, never knew these were anything but earnest exchanges of conviction. Do you believe that the earth was made in 4004 B.C.? Don’t be silly! That was some medieval bishop. The Bible doesn’t give the age. [...]
With A Dogged Persistence
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore: … God was burying America in a ruinous war because He was ignored in America’s founding document. Only if God and Christ were placed in the Constitution could His favor he regained. As the historian Morton Borden has put it, “the Civil War, so it seemed to thousands of [...]
A Sort Of Unofficial International Book Fair
Toby Lester: An avid correspondent, [thirty-four-year-old Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini] wrote often to friends and colleagues back in Italy, and his letters — among them one in which Poggio admits to “doing nothing in Constance” — shed much light on council life. Few of those at the council, in fact, had much to do while [...]
A Band Of Dupes and Impostors
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore: … How shocking Jefferson’s vitriolic attacks on ministers of God, especially those who meddled in politics, seem to late-twentieth-century sensibility. Christ so no need for priests, Jefferson wrote. They were not necessary “for the salvation of souls.” He suggested to John Adams, his friend after they had left politics, [...]
The Route Of Its Citizens Toward Eternal Salvation
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore: On the importance of distinguishing the skills of governors from their religious profession, [Roger] Williams was explicit: “We know the many excellent gifts wherewith it hath pleased God to furnish many, enabling them for publike service to their Counties both in peace and war (as all ages and experience [...]
We Hear With Little Sympathy
Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore: We hear with little sympathy the complaints about satirical abuse heaped upon many religious leaders who have ventured into the arena of political debate. To be sure, they have been lampooned. H. L. Mencken was not the first person to satirize religion and biblical literalism. Nor was Tom Paine, [...]
Habituated To The Inconceivable
Richard Powers: For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing congealed. But after weeks of jetsetting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful [...]