
The Sense of an Ending
Sociologist Peter Berger is right to see academe, alongside law and media, as one stronghold of “Euro-secularity” in a sea of American faith. Not so long ago, theology was academe’s queen. Today, God talk is largely verboten in American universities, even inside religious-studies departments like my own.
Yet hard-core believers still exert a powerful hold over the imaginations of many of us charged with making sense of American religious history. For some, born-agains provoke fears of political campaigns amped up into moral crusades. For others, the God-besotted trigger nostalgia for a way of