The Humanitas Forum

If you don’t carry a smartphone you’re old, odd, or eccentric.  You are hopelessly out of step with the times, according to conventional wisdom.  But is this wisdom?  Or, more precisely, convention without wisdom? 

Technology …

It may be the techies themselves who give us some of our better advice in the debate about the use of communications technology.  Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine, has written that smartphones are the new “sugar and …

How to live in our increasingly secular culture?  That is the question that many, if not most, Christians are asking these days.  But the answer(s) is not clear even for those who have focused greatest attention on various …

“What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt?” was written in 1966 by the sociologist Philip Rieff. 

But it is a line fitting for “The Coddling of the American Mind,” recently published …

From the vantage point of pastoring in Manhattan for some twenty five years, Tim Keller has a distinctive perspective on bringing the Gospel to a diverse secular culture.  He has written about this challenge in several places, most extensively …

Western culture has shaped the church in many ways.  Quite possibly the most “profound and subtle way” is that the church has come to “tacitly and explicitly” accept the dualism that is at the heart of modernity, according to …

Contemporary Christianity has been shaped profoundly by the modern assumption that all religion is to be restricted to the personal and private realms of life.  Christianity has not disappeared.  Rather, it has been relocated with the result that …

A recent article in Cosmopolitan should make a Minnesota mother, a lawyer, the poster child for our contemporary therapeutic culture.  According to sociologist Philip Rieff, in a therapeutic understanding of the world, there is “nothing at stake beyond a …

A current Wall Street Journal article draws attention to the disturbing and growing problem of cutting among teens.  Researchers indicate that between 5% and 10% of adolescents may participate in self-injury behaviors, cutting being the most prominent.

In …

Nancy Pearcey has, in recent years, become one of our leading Evangelical apologists.  Britain’s Economist called her “America’s pre-eminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual.”

Her contribution to the Patheos website’s recent symposium on “Future of Faith in America: Evangelicalism” …