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'For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box. In "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History," published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed. Mr. Hollinger's argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a "punctuation mark" on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom's "Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century"; Jill K. Gill's "Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left"; and David Burns's "Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus." The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

'PORTLAND, Ore. - Four summers ago, on her first day as an administrator at Roosevelt High School here, Charlene Williams heard that the Christians were coming. Some members of an evangelical church were supposed to be painting hallways, repairing bleachers, that sort of thing. The prospect of such help, in the fervently liberal and secular microclimate of Portland, did not exactly fill her with joy. In truth, the connection between SouthLake and Roosevelt very much fit into a plan. It was a plan devised by an especially odd couple - Sam Adams, the first openly gay mayor of Portland, and Kevin Palau, the scion of an evangelical association created by his father, Luis. And their plan has delivered thousands of evangelical volunteers not only to Roosevelt, but also to scores of other public schools in the area and to public agencies dealing with homelessness and foster care. Getting Christian boots on the ground was the easy part. Restraining those boots from proselytizing was the challenge. The very essence of being evangelical, after all, is spreading the good news of the Gospel. Every virtuous act is meant to glorify God. Mr. Adams pointed out to Mr. Palau that service organizations like Rotary and Kiwanis assisted in city programs with the understanding that they would not recruit new members in the process. Mr. Palau said he could abide by such a tacit policy. The mayor took the risk of trusting that promise. "The vast majority of people," Mr. Palau put it recently, "have enough common sense to know that when you're in a school serving a child, that's what you're supposed to do. Trust God that if something is meant to be, it will just emerge." '

Easter is the traditional time for Christians to reaffirm their faith. I want to show that we can do this without renouncing reason. ..."Sources of the self" are the sources nurturing the values that define an individual's life. For me, there are two such sources. One is the Enlightenment, where I'm particularly inspired by Voltaire, Hume and the founders of the American republic. The other is the Catholic Church, in which I was baptized..., ...educated for 8 years ... by Ursuline nuns and for 12 more years by Jesuits. For me to deny either of these sources would be to deny something central to my moral being. ...The Catholic philosophical and theological tradition is a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth, but only if it is combined with the best available secular thought. ...These three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life. What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition. Of course, I can already hear the obvious objection: "What you believe isn't Catholicism - it is a diluted concoction that might satisfy ultra-liberal Protestants or Unitarians, but is nothing like the robust tonic of orthodox Catholic doctrine. My answer is that Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.