Books, Arts & Manners: Machine Gun and Altar

Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Post-Modern Theology, by Harvey Cox (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $16.95)

One of the strangest growths in the wild garden that is modern religious thinking is the secularizing theologian. Apologists in every age have tried to explain faith in terms convincing to the unbeliever: Saint Augustine could warmly embrace Plato, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, to fortify a religious argument. Recently, however, some theologians have been so ready to accommodate their traditions to something confidently defined as the Modern Mind that the question arises whether they are trying to convert the heathen or heathenize the converted.

RR

About the Author

Robert Royal

Robert Royal is editor in chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

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Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Post-Modern Theology, by Harvey Cox (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $16.95)

One of the strangest growths in the wild garden that is modern religious thinking is the secularizing theologian. Apologists in every age have tried to explain faith in terms convincing to the unbeliever: Saint Augustine could warmly embrace Plato, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, to fortify a religious argument. Recently, however, some theologians have been so ready to accommodate their traditions to something confidently defined as the Modern Mind that the question arises whether they are trying to convert the heathen or heathenize the converted.

RR

About the Author

Robert Royal

Robert Royal is editor in chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.