Free Republic

When academics relay their understanding of religion to the rest of us, they offer interpretations that the religiously observant may find a tad bizarre. “Religion has a certain kind of legitimacy among many people and in many parts of the world that secular life simply doesn’t have,” philosophy professor Roger S. Gottlieb explained in an interview with Jennifer Howard that appeared in the June 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “In Madagascar, where the fishermen were dynamiting to get fish and destroying the coral reef and fish stock, when the government said, ‘Don’t do it,’ they kept doing...

Academics finding common cause with left-wing activists are not a new story, particularly since they are frequently the same people. But their effort to influence Evangelical Christians suggests a new twist on an old cliché: If you can’t beat them, subvert them. “For America’s evangelicals, reclaiming the faith would produce a social and political ethic rather different from the one propagated by the religious right,” Professor Randall Balmer writes in the June 23rd Chronicle of Higher Education supplement, The Chronicle Review. “Care for the earth and for God’s creation provides a good place to start, building on the growing evangelical...