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Marilynne Robinson, on how biblical narratives influenced realist fictions' honoring of "common" human experiences (consciously or unconsciously)

History of book-length presentations of the written word.

'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.

Successful theist philosopher - & book against Dawkins, et al.

A.D. 375: Monks living in the desert in Egypt identify eight thoughts that weaken their devotion. Talking Back, a book by Roman monk Evagrius of Pontus, instructs monks on how to fight gluttony, lust, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory and pride. This article was originally published with the title History of Sin.

A.D. 375: Monks living in the desert in Egypt identify eight thoughts that weaken their devotion. Talking Back, a book by Roman monk Evagrius of Pontus, instructs monks on how to fight gluttony, lust, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory and pride. This article was originally published with the title History of Sin.

Praise for Kidder's true story of a Burundi refugee who came to US, went to med school, & returned to build a clinic

J.L.A. Garcia sees as wicked the viewpoint he attributes to Singer: "He has little use for most of the central elements of ethical sensibility and compunction, seeing rights and virtues as mere instruments in the service of maximizing the satisfaction of interests; and indeed he vigorously rejects the notion that there are distinctively human values-a view he dismisses as the pernicious consequence of "speciesism."

W.B.Wilcox (Yale research fellow) on C.Smith's "Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want" - a book which denies evangelical views are monolithic, or a threat to political moderation & tolerance.

Review by Judith Shulevitz (author of "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time"): Wade asserts "the God gene" & its evolutionary function - "to bind human beings into cooperative groups," making altruism, group (over self-) interest & solidarity a matter of conscience (with the gods as enforcers). Shulevitz's criticism is "that he has under-ambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is."

3 classic (& lousy) arguments that it's irrational to fear death - review of Simon Critchley's 'Book of Dead Philosophers'

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's book What Darwin Got Wrong - says reviewer Richard C. Lewontin - considers an immense amount of biology missing from our modern formulation of evolution by natural selection. Why, when vertebrates evolved wings, did they have to give up their front legs to do it? Why don't birds that live in trees make a living by eating the leaves instead of spending so much of their energy looking for seeds or worms?

Most people in health care understand and accept the need for clinical hierarchies. The problem is that we aren't usually prepared for them; nor are we given protocols for resolving the inevitable tensions that arise over appropriate care. Doctors and nurses are trained differently, and our sense of priorities can conflict. When that happens, the lack of an established, neutral way of resolving such clashes works to everyone's detriment. This isn't about hurt feelings or bruised egos. Modern health care is complex, highly technical and dangerous, and the lack of flexible, dynamic protocols to facilitate communication along the medical hierarchy can be deadly. Indeed, preventable medical errors kill 100,000 patients a year, or a million people a decade, wrote Rosemary Gordon and Janardan Prasad Singh in their book "Wall of Silence."

But the "last chance" for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: "Now this is your last chance." "This is really your last chance." "I'm giving you just one more chance. I'm not kidding." Of course you are, and your kids know it. They're not idiots. But they're also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting? Why all the choices - "What would you like to wear?"- and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They're toddlers, not Pakistan. I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic. Above all I'm confounded by the boundless fretting, as if ushering kids into adulthood were some newfangled sorcery dependent on a slew of child-rearing books and a bevy of child-rearing blogs.

Jud Newborn, a Holocaust scholar who lives in Plainview, was doing research in Munich as a graduate student in the early 1980s when he became intrigued with the story of the White Rose resistance movement. The small, student-based group wrote and printed anonymous anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich and distributed them in that city and beyond before its key members were captured and executed in 1943. Dr. Newborn, who earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago, is the co-author with Annette Dumbach of a book on the White Rose and has developed a multimedia lecture on the subject. In recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 8 this year), he will present the lecture at two Long Island synagogues. The lecture will be accompanied by nearly 80 historical images, including photographs, posters and newspaper articles, as well as recorded music. Dr. Newborn may also occasionally speak with a mock-German accent when quoting Nazi officials, in the service of his White Rose presentation. (The second half of the program focuses on more contemporary figures who have acted heroically against great odds.)

'When I began to spend time, 10 years ago, at an evangelical church in Chicago..., I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.... 'Rev. Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life," one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts.... 'In my own research, the more people affirmed, "I feel God's love for me, directly," the less stressed and lonely they were and the fewer psychiatric symptoms they reported.'

Murray ignores economic/government reasons for "collapse of middle class" and focuses only on "social structure"

A KERFUFFLE has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe's existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it "moronic" and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

huge importance of Lyndon Johnson's passage of Civil Rights acts

huge importance of Lyndon Johnson's passage of Civil Rights acts in 1964

Scientist Matthew Lieberman uncovers the neuroscience of human connections - and the broad implications for how we live our lives. "When we experience social pain - a snub, a cruel word - the feeling is as real as physical pain. That finding is among those in a new book, SOCIAL."