The Humanitas Forum

“Your mama don’t dance, And your daddy don’t rock and roll,” a line from the 1972 hit by Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina, offers insight into generational tensions at a critical time in American culture.  The rock ’n roll …

Sigmund Freud was the sole subject of the seminar that Dr. Armand Nicholi began teaching at Harvard in 1967.  Student reaction was mixed.  Half of the students agreed with Freud, but the other half disagreed strongly.  The …

What is the chief end of God?  The “chief end of God is to glorify us and to be useful to us indefinitely.”  This inversion of the opening line of the Westminster Confession is theologian Leander Keck’s way …

In popular culture we live and move and have our being.  This observation by theologian Robert Banks is hard to argue with since American society has very little of what has historically been called high culture.  In agreement, …

In less than four hundred words, poet Steve Turner gives us a helpful survey of the modern mind.  His satirical poem “Creed” details many of the beliefs and practices of those who claim to reject all creeds in favor …

Our foundational institutions—the family, the church, the school—have become zombie institutions.  They are alive, but they no longer perform the critical roles they played in the past.

Contemporary culture is liquid, in the words of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.…

“Privately engaging, socially irrelevant” is how one sociologist describes privatized Christianity.  Things of faith are restricted to the Christian’s personal life.  Faith is left at home and at church and not taken into the public arena.

Religion doesn’t …

The family is in bad shape.  Divorce, single parenting, hard economic times, and parents who are overly busy and distracted are a few of the contributing factors. 

The problems of poor parenting gets everyone’s attention—from organizations such …

Living out of sync with the ways of our secular age can be vexing!  In one sense, frustration is understandable since cultural momentum favors the secular bent of society.  But frustration can lead to an ineffective and dangerous …

Dress, manners and morals.  Isn’t it possible that we’ve lost something in our current culture of casual?  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, with casual as an almost universal guiding principle, we live in an age of “sloppy …