The Winter 2011 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

Faith & Politics
Wilfred McClay on the Cities of God & Man
Russell Moore on the Politics of Dominion
Jordan Ballor on the Common Good
Robert George on Constitution & Creed

Features
Eric Teetsel on Capitalist Evangelism
Benjamin Domenech on the Untrained Grasshopper
Terrence Moore on Steve Jobs & Capitalism
Owen Strachan on the Charismatic Question
Paul D. Miller on The Lessons of Iraq

Books & Culture
Louis Markos on God and Morality
Richard Reinsch on Redeeming Democracy
R.J. Snell on Cormac McCarthy & Sloth
Peter Lawler on The Cloned Soul

A Republic of Letters
Hunter Baker

Poetry by Bill Coyle
The Word by Cotton Mather

The Summer 2011 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

Renewing the Liberal Arts
Louis Markos, Brad Green, & John Mark Reynolds

The Path Ahead
A Conversation with Donald Rumsfeld
Paul D. Miller on How We Engage the World
Peter Lawler on What We Learn from Tocqueville
D.C. Innes on Who We Trust in Politics

Books & Culture
Maureen Mullarkey on the Fallacy of Art Appreciation
Nathan Finn on God’s Country
Ryan T. Anderson on Redeeming Economics
David J. Davis on Secularism
Micah Mattix on the Politicized Bard

Poetry
Geoffrey Brock

A Republic of Letters
Hunter Baker

The Word
John Henry Newman

The Spring 2011 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

PUBLIC POLICY & THE CHURCH
Mark Amstutz & Peter Meilaender

EXCEPTIONALISM & AUTHORITY
Wilfred McClay on Public Policy & Mastery
Elliott Abrams on the Future of Foreign Policy
Ted Bromund on the Exceptional Battleground
Paul J. Bonicelli on Capitalism & Chile
Erick-Woods Erickson on The Tea Party’s Future
Samuel Gregg on Solidarity & Socialism

BOOKS & CULTURE
Paul D. Miller on Christopher Nolan
Julie Ponzi on Fatherhood
Paul Cella on Whittaker Chambers
Andrew Walker on Constantine
Louis Markos on The Sacred Narrative

With Poetry by Dorothy L. Sayers
A Republic of Letters by Hunter Baker
And The Word by John Knox

The Fall 2010 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

ART & SOCIETY
Matthew Milliner on Two Art Worlds
Matt Boyleston on Literature & Irony
A Discourse on Bob Dylan & America

A NEW AGE
Samuel Gregg on Deficits & The Devil
Dean M. Riley on The Age of Information
Mollie Hemingway on Marriage & Bigotry
Joseph Knippenberg on Faith & Obama
Jay Richards on Christian Socialism

BOOKS & CULTURE
R. Albert Mohler Jr. on The Emerging Adults
Micah Mattix on Ayn Rand’s World
Jordan Ballor on Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Lou Markos on Evangelism & the Jews
With Poetry by Catherine Tufariello
The Republic of Letters by Hunter Baker
And The Word by Cyril of Alexandria

The Spring 2010 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. A list of contents follows – we hope you enjoy it.

THE NEW WORLD
Paul Bonicelli on Haiti & Ordered Liberty
Eric Metaxas asks Does God Want Us to Change the World?
Arthur Brooks on the Future of American Enterprise
Congressman Frank Wolf on Debt: The Test of a Moral Society

ETHICS & SOCIETY
Edward Feser on F.A. Hayek & Scientism
Francis J. Beckwith on Death & Society
Hunter Baker on Martin Buber & Walker Percy
Louis Markos on Why We Still Need Plato
Thomas G. West on the Great Separation

BOOKS & CULTURE
Matt Boyleston on Literature & Faith
Kevin Walker on the Wages of Progress
Daniel A. Siedell on Icons & Iconoclasm

With Poetry by A.E. Stallings & John Updike
And The Word by Jonathan Edwards

+++

The Summer 2009 issue of The City has been posted in full via Issuu, and is now available below. We hope you enjoy it.

Contents:

A Very Model of a Modern Evangelical
John Mark Reynolds + Francis J. Beckwith
Matthew Lee Anderson

Featuring
The Soul & The City + Wilfred McClay
Who Owns Science? + Hunter Baker
Solzhenitsyn & The Future + Peter Augustine Lawler
Obama & Abortion + Robert P. George
On Marriage + Jonathan Rauch & Joseph Knippenberg
Christ in the Classroom + Louis Markos

Books & Culture
Russell D. Moore on Updike’s Run
Matthew J. Milliner on Gore Walk
Jordan Ballor on The Media’s Blind Spot
Paul Bonicelli on Aid For Africa

Poetry
Lovejoy Street by A.E. Stallings

The Word
St. John Chrysostom on Faith and Politics

Today we’re happy to reprint a piece on “End Times for Christian America” by HBU’s own Hunter Baker, an assistant professor of government, who is the author of the forthcoming The End of Secularism which is being published by Crossway Books this August.

Christian America is busy dying again.

If you believe some partisan historians, it was dead before the American Revolution, or at least, nobody important was a Christian by then. The Founders had all moved on to deism. Then again, maybe Christian America died at the Scopes Trial during the 1920s when Clarence Darrow pinned down the non-theologian, non-scientist politician William Jennings Bryan with the power of hostile cross-examination. If it wasn’t dead by then, it was really dead by the late 1960s when every other religion book seemed to be about either the death of God movement or “secular” Christianity. The most memorable volume of the period was Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, which put a happy face of the death of public Christianity and heralded a new, more mature age of secular community.

Meanwhile, a host of prominent sociologists of religion sagely assured the public (and each other) that public faith simply could not co-exist with a world full of technological wonders like conveyor belts, cathode ray tubes, and time and motion studies. The great sociologist Peter Berger imagined tiny groups of believers huddled together against the coming of the 21st century.

In the years following Cox’s book, Christian America exploded back into the American consciousness. Evangelists popped up all over television (just as they had on radio earlier). The former Nixon hatchet man Chuck Colson (who once said he’d run over his own grandmother to help Richard Nixon) experienced a religious conversion and turned Born Again into a household expression with his mega-selling book. America followed Nixon by electing Jimmy Carter, an outspoken evangelical enthusiastically backed by\…wait for it…Pat Robertson! Disappointed with Carter, Christian conservatives became part of the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan to two terms in the White House.

Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club began selling Christian books in huge numbers and better metrics often put religious titles at the top of the bestseller list (Prayer of Jabez, anyone?). Along the way, many sociologists of religion, like Berger and Rodney Stark, turned on the old secularization thesis and began to proclaim the theory more ideologically-loaded than truly descriptive. Cox, looking back on his once-important book, would eventually note apologetically that he had relied on what the sociologists were claiming at the time. Christian America, it seemed, was not actually dead at all. Not even close.

Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, is in line to become the new Harvey Cox. In a recent issue of the magazine, he wrote a major piece on the end of Christian America. Meacham relies on a longitudinal survey of the American public (the ARIS study) which shows a 10 percent drop in the number of self-identified Christians and a 7 percent increase in the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation to suggest religious decline. Triumphant secularists and worried Christians alike are chattering away about the decline of Christianity in America.

The meme will make for good newsprint (or maybe I should say newspixels as the papers are dying much more rapidly than Christian America ever could), but it is all severely premature. Consider the work done in 2006 by Baylor University with funding from the Templeton Foundation and fieldwork by Gallup. Their findings countered the secularization narrative and tellingly showed that even among the religiously unaffiliated, nearly two-thirds believe in God or some higher power. That study got a lot less attention, in part because it did not play into the persistent story of religious decline pushed by those anxious for it to occur.

“Christianity is important in America!” is no more a story than “dog bites man.” “The death of Christianity,” on the other hand, grabs eyeballs. Secularists are joined by many Christians who assume religious decline will precede an eschatological event in which God removes his church from the earth. Thus, they expect to hear this kind of story. The narratives of ideological secularists on one hand and end-times theorists like Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth) or Tim LaHaye (Left Behind) are not as different as one might assume.

The wise observer will be more cautious. It was less than five years ago that Garry Wills, flustered by the re-election of George W. Bush, wrote histrionically for The New York Times about “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out.” He bemoaned the power of Christianity over the American people and expressed his own disbelief that his fellow citizens endorsed the Virgin Birth more readily than Darwin’s theory. Bush’s victory, a substantial improvement over his performance in 2000, was largely credited to an unusually heavy turn-out among Catholics and Evangelicals in his favor. Does anyone really think that things have changed so much in five years?

The simple truth of the matter is that America turns on the margins. A movement gets the right politician, finds the right message, and builds a coalition that can command the levers of power. Suddenly, it seems the losers have been cast out and the winners are ascendant. But it is never as simple as that. Nor is it ever really over. Barack Obama is the president. To many, particularly to many social elites, he appears to be the avatar of secular enlightenment. But don’t tell that to the overwhelming majority of his ethnic fan base or to the young, white evangelicals his campaign actively courted. Ronald Reagan was president, too. His rise seemed to augur a new era for religion in the public square. Yet that was not the reason many libertarians and corporate interests supported him.

America is a complicated place. We are a dynamic society because we are a free society. From our birth as a republic, we have been a quasi-stable partnership of enlightenment modernism and vigorous Christian belief working together for the preservation of ordered liberty. There will be more proclamations of the death of Christian America. It is as good a story as the “war” between science and religion, which gets a makeover every time we have a slow news day.

The smart money is on Christianity to be around and relevant for as long as the American republic endures. The even smarter money says the faith will outlast the republic just as it did the empire into which it was born.

By Hunter Baker. “End Times for Christian America?” Acton Institute (May 13, 2009). Reprinted with permission of the Acton Institute.

While there is much in the world to love, it is best loved in relation to the One who made it. The world is beautiful, but much fairer is the One who fashioned it. The world is glorious, but more delightful is the One by whom the world was established. Therefore, let us labor as much as we can, beloved, that love of the world as such may not overwhelm us, and that we may not love the creature more than the creator. God has given us earthly possession in order that we may love him with our whole heart and soul. But sometimes we provoke God’s displeasure against us when we love his gifts more than God himself. The same thing happens in human relationships. Suppose someone gives a special gift to his protégé. But the protégé then begins to despise the giver, and loves the gift more than the one who gave. Suppose he comes to think of the giver no longer as friend but enemy. Just so it is with our relationship with God. We love more those who love us for ourselves rather than our gifts. So God is known to love those who love him more than the earthly gifts he gives.

Caesarius of Arles
Sermons

• A new study from BARNA highlights the technology gap within generations, and within the Church.
• Books & Culture features an interesting article by Michael McConnell on reformed theology and America’s founding.
• This weekend, author and fatherhood expert David Blankenhorn (who wrote a piece for our most recent issue) had a controversial but interesting column in the New York Times written with Jonathan Rauch, proposing a compromise position on same-sex marriage intended to protect churches.
• The EPPC’s Yuval Levin has a piece in the March edition of First Things describing the coming ethical issues in the biotech arena.
• Over at First Principles, you can find an excerpt of David Novak’s upcoming book, In Defense of Religious Liberty. It’s worth reading, and will be published by ISI Books later this year.

Turn, rather, to these teachings, my very dear friend: take up your cross and follow the Lord. For, when I noticed that you were being slowed down in your divine purpose by your preoccupation with domestic cares, I felt that you were being carried and dragged by your cross rather than that you were carrying it ahead of you. That cross of ours which the Lord commands us to carry, that we may be as well armed as possible in following Him, what else does it mean but the mortality of this flesh? It makes us suffer now until death is swallowed up in victory. Therefore, this cross must itself be crucified and pierced with the nails of the fear of God, for we should not be able to carry it if it resisted us with free and unfettered limbs. There is no other way for you to follow the Lord except by carrying it, for how can you follow Him if you are not His?

Saint Augustine of Hippo
Letter to Laetus

• Gary Hartenburg responds to Matthew Lee Anderson’s piece on The New Evangelical Scandal (Winter 2008) at Mere Orthodoxy.
• At the First Things blog, Jordan Hylden writes on Anglicans in Africa.
• The Barna Group offers a fascinating survey on spiritual gifts.
• Marking the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the Claremont Institute collects an impressive series of writings on the president.

Struck with grief you were, though only four,
The day your mother cut her mermaid hair
And stood, a stranger, smiling at the door.
They frowned, tsk-tsked your willful, cruel despair,
When you slunk beneath the long piano strings
And sobbed until your lungs hiccupped for air,
Unbribable with curses, cake, playthings.
You mourned a mother now herself no more,
But brave and fashionable. The golden rings
That fringed her naked neck, whom were they for?
Not you, but for the world, now in your place,
A full eclipse. You wept down on the floor;
She wept up in her room. They told you this:
That she could grow it back, and just as long,
They told you, lying always about loss,
For you know she never did. And they were wrong.

© A. E. Stallings. From Archaic Smile, University of Evansville Press; originally printed in the Formalist; reprinted by permission of the author.