essay on late modernism

What is Late Modernism?

And why you should care

Welcome back to Critical Eye , Alexandra Lange's incisive, observant, curious, human- and street-friendly architecture column for Curbed. In this edition, Lange pinpoints the next era of preservation-worthy architecture, now that modernism (midcentury, International Style) has become an accepted cause célèbre . First things first: What defines this so-called “Late Modernism,” anyway?

If non-architects know the Citicorp Center— New York’s youngest landmark when designated at 38—they know it for its flaw. Shortly after its completion in 1978, a student called the office of its engineer, William J. LeMessurier, and asked about the four 24-foot-square, 100-foot-tall “super” columns, unusually positioned at the center of each of the skyscraper’s facades, that help to hold the building up.

In designing the building’s innovative structural system, LeMessurier had correctly calculated the strength of the wind hitting each face of the building straight on, but had failed to reckon with the extra strain of the “quartering” winds which hit the building’s cantilevered corners. In responding to the student’s questions, he realized he had made a mistake—one compounded by the substitution of bolted structural joints for welded ones, which are much stronger. By his calculations, a storm strong enough to topple the building hits the city every 55 years.

LeMessurier alerted Citicorp, who hired Leslie E. Robertson, engineer of the Twin Towers, to perform an ex post facto fix, “welding two-inch-thick steel plates over each of more than two hundred bolted joints,” a task which took two months. A press release issued at the time shows masterful use of the passive voice: “A review of the Citicorp Center’s designation specifications was recently made . . . [it] caused the engineers to recommend that certain of the connections in Citicorp Center’s wind bracing system be strengthened through additional welding . . . there is no danger.”

All this would have remained hidden by that bland language, were it not for some loose party talk. “The Fifth-Nine Story Crisis” was the title of Joe Morgenstern’s thrillingly written 1995 New Yorker story on the fix; a 2004 99% Invisible episode also told the tale , with the important update of the identification of the student—a woman, as it happened—named Diane Hartley.

But those “super” columns, now strong enough, the engineers say, “to withstand a seven-hundred-year storm,” did much more than give the engineers heart attacks.

Under Citicorp’s 72-foot cantilevers lay one of New York’s first mixed-use complexes, a city in the shadow of the tower, with a sunken, terraced public court, a three-level, 277,000-square-foot market topped with a (still-missed) Conran’s, and a gem-shaped, granite-clad church, St. Peter’s, that looks a little like a chip off the 59-story satiny steel-clad block.

Citicorp Center was architect Hugh Stubbins’s first major commission, and would be his only skyscraper in New York. Up top, the building looks lopped off at a 45-degree angle, making it instantly recognizable on the skyline. That simple slant was originally supposed to hold stepped apartments— like a beachfront resort in the sky—and then a solar array. In the end, it is just an angle, but that’s enough.

The brawny columns and structural derring-do, the strikingly smooth shaft, and the somewhat crude geometry make Citicorp an ideal example of Late Modernism—a style with a boring name that you are going to be hearing much, much more about, now that its buildings, like so many of us, approach age 40. (In New York City, buildings must be over 30 to be considered for landmark status; the National Register of Historic Places generally considered “historic” sites to be over 50.)

My nine-year-old is learning the five-paragraph essay this year, and the teacher insists that each paragraph have evidence. Here is my evidence for Late Modernism’s claim on our attention: Citicorp’s landmark designation ; I.M. Pei’s Glass Pyramid at the Louvre, which just received the AIA’s 25-Year Award; Gio Ponti’s little-known, castle-like 1971 North Building for the Denver Art Museum , being restored to expand gallery space and give visitors access to the top floor and its gorgeous views, as Ponti always intended; Pei’s 1978 East Building for the National Gallery of Art , renovated and looking better than ever.

These buildings exhibit beefy bold shapes, wrapped in singular materials, sticking their sharp corners in our faces. More refined than Brutalism, less picturesque than Postmodernism, Late Modernism is what happened in the 1970s and early 1980s and, 40-ish years later, it is history.

British architecture critic Charles Jencks celebrated Late Modernism in a 1980 book called, appropriately, Late-Modern Architecture , emphasizing the era’s architects’ pragmatism (willingness to work on large-scale corporate projects), their commitment to order (grids), their dramatic interior sections (balcony upon balcony). The designers of the day were committed to the “covering of this space with flat membranes of an homogenous material whether glass, nylon or brick: the tendency for polished surfaces whether these are brown, blue or, most appropriately silver.”

That blue is telling, because while I am leaning heavily on New York examples, Los Angeles has rightful claim on some of the finest examples of Late Modernism: Cesar Pelli’s 1975 Blue Whale at the Pacific Design Center , to which he added green and red siblings over the next four decades. (The blue and green buildings were both made City of West Hollywood Designated Cultural Resources in 2003.)

Pelli and Anthony Lumsden were colleagues in Eero Saarinen’s office, where they worked on the ur-Late Modern Bell Labs, a.k.a. “the biggest mirror ever.” Lumsden had been unable to convince Kevin Roche to use a reverse mullion for that project, which would have made its surface skin-smooth. Lumsden recalled the idea when working with Pelli at DMJM, in L.A., referring to their subsequent buildings as “the membrane aesthetic.”

Late Modern’s West Coast proponents briefly grouped themselves for a 1976 UCLA exhibition as the Silvers, shininess, reflective glass and metal cladding all being dominant players in its execution, in contrast to the austere Corbusian planes of The Whites and the historicist shingles of The Grays. For brown, there’s the Ford Foundation , right on the cusp, and the long grey-brown balconies of Edward Bassett for SOM’s 1971 Weyerhaeuser Headquarters , meant to be obscured by spilling vines.

Late Modernism is a style without theory, practiced by architects who were trying to build their way out of the diminishing returns of Miesian copies. Where a Mies tower (and its numerous knockoffs) seems to suck in its cheeks, the Late Modern tower fills itself edge-to-edge, visually pressing its mirrors out while staying within the lines. Those lines include triangles, chamfers, stair-steps and the occasional curve, but rarely bilateral symmetry.

Late Modernism shades into Postmodernism with projects like Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s P ittsburgh Plate Glass Place , which directly references Gothic architecture. The pressure on the skin creates tension in a sliced-away corner, or a narrow gap like the one between the two trapezoidal towers at Johnson and Burgee’s 1975 Pennzoil Place in Houston.

One of Late Modernism’s problems, preservation-wise, may be its large scale and oft corporate clientele. As Kazys Varnelis has pointed out , “Modernism was no longer revolutionary for the late moderns. Instead, they worked to give physical form to big business and big government. As these would come under scathing criticism in the 1960s, the late moderns would be tarred along with them.” At 99 Percent Invisible, Kate Wagner recently called attention to a latent criticism of Late Modern embedded in popular films: big, unreadable buildings without clear entrances often serve as HQs for Evil, Inc .

It is helpful to have an emotional argument to accompany the historical one when fighting for a building’s life. In my husband’s childhood memories of Manhattan, two swooping buildings, W.R. Grace on West 42nd Street (Gordon Bunshaft for SOM, 1974) and the Solow Building on 57th (same architect, same year), stand out as dramatic anomalies.

But does anyone want to hug—or propose in the public atrium of— the IBM Building ? A rare petite example is Paul Kennon’s 1978 AT&T Switching Station in Columbus, Indiana, a mirrored box at the scale of the surrounding 19th-century retail streets, dressed up with rainbow “organ pipes” hiding the mechanical systems.

One of my arguments for the preservation of the Ambassador Grill and the lobby of the UN Plaza Hotel—still up in the air with New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission—was that they were distinctive, destination spaces in which memories were made. Are there not diplomats who might speak of international deals brokered under that mirrored sky?

Similarly, it is a shame that religious interiors are exempt from the Landmarks Law, because Massimo and Lella Vignelli’s warm, Scandinavian-inspired design for St. Peter’s Church, a diamond embedded at the base of the Citicorp cantilever, looks better than ever, down to the Op Art bargello embroidery on the seat cushions. Many a modernist marriage has chosen that backdrop.

And yet, some of today’s most celebrated architects ought to be the style’s chief proponents, because we would not have some of the city’s most anticipated buildings of 2016, 2017, and beyond without Late Modernism.

Just look at New York’s skyline: BIG’s hyperbolic parabaloid on West 57th Street is not the only glassy pyramid scudding across the landscape—there’s Roche Dinkeloo’s College Life Insurance headquarters in Indianapolis , completed in 1972. Herzog & De Meuron’s 56 Leonard , where the curtain wall seems pushed to its limit to smoothly contain the pressure of those popping boxes and balconies, is the child of previous dematerializations of the dumb glass rectangle that include Der Scutt’s 1983 Trump Tower. (Which is, pace the hideous marble lobby, quite a good building. Try looking at it in black-and-white sometime when we are all calmer, and public access is fully restored.)

Asymmetry and glassiness, combined with structural derring-do and plants asked to perform at the scale of the city—as in BIG’s proposed Spiral for Hudson Yards and (less likely) 2 World Trade Center —are wholly au courant. Looking backward, Jean Nouvel’s spangles on 100 Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, and OMA’s angles at the Seattle Public Library , are also sons of Late Modernism.

The city skyline is a lesson in architectural history, and too lively a finger on the delete button robs the present of meaning and the past of presence. Rafael Vinoly’s 432 Park Avenue still looks wildly out of place to me, but I know it will feel familiar in time.

Scanning the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is a good way to pick the icons from the also-rans, and the Citicorp Building presents character in a way One Bryant Park never will. Late Modernism, born of capital, speaks to the way we build now, literally mirroring the ambition of today’s shape makers.

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Introduction

• Published: May 2022
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Drawing upon recent work in the new modernist studies, the Introduction offers a sustained critical engagement with recent theorisations of late modernism. Noting that the three decades following the end of the Second World War saw the publication of dozens of key poetic texts by second-generation modernists, it argues for a revised periodisation of late modernism that accounts for its living on well into the late twentieth century. It also argues that late modernist poetry is distinctive for the complexity of the geographical imaginations to which it gives expression, particularly through a concern for the poetics of place. Where high modernism is essentially an art of cities, especially metropolitan centres, late modernist poets often develop profound material and imaginative engagements with local, marginal, and non-metropolitan places.

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Late Modernism: British Literature at Midcentury

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Late Modernism and post-modernism

As the International Style spread across the globe, architects looked to break free of the "glass box."

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• Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature

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• John Whittier-Ferguson , University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Book description

This wide-ranging study of the late poetry and prose of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wyndham Lewis brings together works from the 1930s and 1940s - writings composed by authors self-consciously entering middle to old age and living through years when civilization seemed intent on tearing itself to pieces for the second time in their adult lives. Profoundly revising their earlier work, these artists asked how their writing might prove significant in a time that Woolf described, in a diary entry from 1938, as '1914 but without even the illusion of 1914. All slipping consciously into a pit'. This late modern writing explores mortality, the frailties of culture, and the potential consolations and culpabilities of aesthetic form. Such writing is at times horrifying and objectionable and at others deeply moving, different from the earlier works which first won these writers their fame.

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Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature - Half title page pp i-ii

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Mortality and Form in Late Modernist Literature - Title page pp iii-iii

• By John Whittier-Ferguson

Copyright page pp iv-iv

Dedication pp v-vi, contents pp vii-vii, illustrations pp viii-viii, acknowledgments pp ix-xii, introduction - virginia woolf’s late style pp 1-30, chapter 1 - “old timber to new fires” pp 31-79.

• T. S. Eliot’s Christian Poetry

Chapter 2 - “Once Out of Nature” pp 80-139

• Gertrude Stein and the Fashioning of War

Chapter 3 - “Almost Real” pp 140-197

• Wyndham Lewis and the Second World War

Conclusion - Aftermaths and Aesthetic Form pp 198-210

Notes pp 211-248, works cited pp 249-268, index pp 269-276, works cited, full text views.

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Theory, Culture, & Late Modernity

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What are the challenges to the viability of religious faith and other ethical sources in the late modern world?

Chair: james davison hunter.

The epochal revolution of the last five hundred years in the West was not political, but rather the totalizing reconfiguration of social, economic, technological, political, and thus cultural life called modernity. Ideas as well as economic and political structures, consciousness as well as behavior and relationships have all been fundamentally transformed. As modernity evolves, they are still transforming.

The place, role, meaning, and identity of religion have changed in tandem with modernity’s social, economic, political and ultimately cultural transformations. The assumptions of theistic worldviews and the cultures they spawn have been profoundly, thoroughly, and irreversibly challenged and altered—a reality observable in these traditions’ theology, doctrine, belief, authority, language, ritual, ecclesiology, ethics, and behavior.

In light of all this, the Colloquy on Religion and Late Modernity aims to illuminate and to resist the pitfalls of current academic paradigms for understanding the inexorable, totalizing effect of religious identity and its shifts on all realms of cultural life—vocation, race, sexuality, community, and so on. While the modern university organizes its religious scholarship merely to present and consequently to undermine the unique historical momentum of the three religions “of the Book,” the Institute embraces, celebrates, and critiques them in ultimate service to the common good.

Race, Faith & Culture Working Group

The goal of the Race, Faith & Culture Working Group is to shed light into the interconnectedness of race and religion as it shapes our culture today.

Vocation and the Common Good Working Group

This project will conduct theological, historical, and sociological research on nine specific vocations to help both clergy and laity to understand the unique challenges posed to faith and work in the late modern world. 

• 42 All Publications

CST: Why are We Hiding Our Light Under a Bushel? (With some notes on the US Program of Priestly Formation)

Christina mcrorie.

Writing with Henry Glynn for Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church Forum,  Christina McRorie  published "CST: Why are We Hiding Our Light Under a Bushel? (With some notes on the US Program of Priestly Formation."

Comparative Religious Ethics

• Charles T. Mathewes , Matthew Puffer , Mark Storslee
• Routledge, December 2015

By gathering together both "classic" statements, exemplifying paradigmatic approaches in the field, and recent, ground-breaking and innovative works, Comparative Religious Ethics is the gold standard for anyone working on the field of comparative religious ethics in coming decades.

Kingdom Politics: In Search of a New Political Imagination for Today's Church

• Kristopher Norris , Sam Speers
• Cascade Books, December 2015

American Christians, weary of decades of entrenched partisan feuding, are increasingly distancing themselves from politics. Some, however, continue to turn toward the state and public policy to find solutions to the world's problems. The problem is that both responses allow a narrow vision of politics to determine the church's mission and ministries, which often ends up separating its commitment to personal faith from the pursuit of social justice—the King from the kingdom. Christians too easily forget that the church is inherently political, a community defined by its allegiance to a King, its citizenship in a new world, and its call to work alongside others in pursuit of a new way of life. The church needs a political vision that is more than blind acceptance or mere rejection of past models. It needs a positive vision that takes its cues about politics not from the nation-state but from another political reality: the kingdom of God. This book tells the stories of the visits of two researchers to five diverse congregations across the United States. From the megachurch energy of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California, to a young Emergent community in Minneapolis, to the politically active home of Martin Luther King in Atlanta, these stories illuminate the vastly different ways congregations understand and approach politics—and offer a glimpse of a new political imagination for today's church.

Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond: Religion in the Modern World

Neslihan cevik.

• Palgrave Macmillan, December 2015

This book identifies a new Islamic form in Turkey: Muslimism. Neither fundamentalism nor liberal religion, Muslimism engages modernity through Islamic categories and practices. This new form has implications for discussions of democracy and Islam in the region, similar movements across religious traditions, and social theory on religion.

A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

• Alon Confino
• Yale University Press, December 2014

Why exactly did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany on November 9, 1938? The perplexing event has not been adequately accounted for by historians in their large-scale assessments of how and why the Holocaust occurred. In this gripping new analysis, Alon Confino draws on an array of archives across three continents to propose a penetrating new assessment of one of the central moral problems of the twentieth century. To a surprising extent, Confino demonstrates, the mass murder of Jews during the war years was powerfully anticipated in the culture of the prewar years.

The author shifts his focus away from the debates over what the Germans did or did not know about the Holocaust and explores instead how Germans came to conceive of the idea of a Germany without Jews. He traces the stories the Nazis told themselves—where they came from and where they were heading—and how those stories led to the conclusion that Jews must be eradicated in order for the new Nazi civilization to arise. The creation of this new empire required that Jews and Judaism be erased from Christian history, and this was the inspiration—and justification—for Kristallnacht. As Germans imagined a future world without Jews, persecution and extermination became imaginable, and even justifiable.

The Mighty and the Almighty: An Essay in Political Theology

• Nicholas Wolterstorff
• Cambridge University Press, December 2014

For a century or more political theology has been in decline. Recent years, however, have seen increasing interest not only in how church and state should be related, but in the relation between divine authority and political authority, and in what religion has to say about the limits of state authority and the grounds of political obedience. In this book, Nicholas Wolterstorff addresses this whole complex of issues. He takes account of traditional answers to these questions, but on every point stakes out new positions. Wolterstorff offers a fresh theological defense of liberal democracy, argues that the traditional doctrine of 'two rules' should be rejected and offers a fresh exegesis of Romans 13; the canonical biblical passage for the tradition of Christian political theology. This book provides useful discussion for scholars and students of political theology, law and religion, philosophy of religion and social ethics.

Journey toward Justice: Personal Encounters in the Global South

• Baker Publishing Group, December 2013

Christianity's demographics, vitality, and influence have tipped markedly toward the global South and East. Addressing this seismic shift, one of today's leading Christian scholars reflects on what he has learned about justice through his encounters with world Christianity. Philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff's experiences in South Africa, the Middle East, and Honduras have shaped his views on justice through the years. In this book he offers readers an autobiographical tour, distilling the essence of his thoughts on the topic. After describing how he came to think about justice as he does and reviewing the theory of justice he developed in earlier writings, Wolterstorff shows how deeply embedded justice is in Christian Scripture. He reflects on the difficult struggle to right injustice and examines the necessity of just punishment. Finally, he explores the relationship between justice and beauty and between justice and hope. This book is the first in the Turning South series, which offers reflections by eminent Christian scholars who have turned their attention and commitments toward the global South and East.

God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide

• Thomas Albert Howard
• Oxford University Press, December 2011

Since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the United States and Western Europe's paths to modernity have diverged sharply with respect to religion. In short, Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts. What explains this transatlantic religious divide?

Accessing the topic though nineteenth and early twentieth-century European commentary on the United States, Thomas Albert Howard argues that an 'Atlantic gap' in religious matters has deep and complex historical roots, and enduringly informs some strands of European disapprobation of the United States. While exploring in the first chapters 'Old World' disquiet toward the young republic's religious dynamics, the book turns in the final chapters and focuses on more constructive European assessments of the United States. Acknowledging the importance of Alexis de Tocqueville for the topic, Howard argues that a widespread overreliance on Tocqueville as interpreter of America has had a tendency to overshadow other noteworthy European voices. Two underappreciated figures here receive due attention: the Protestant Swiss-German church historian, Philip Schaff, and the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain. 

While the transatlantic religious divide has received commentary from journalists and sociologists in recent decades, this is the first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject.

God's Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics

• December 2011

Is religion a force for good or evil in world politics? How much influence does it have? Despite predictions of its decline, religion has resurged in political influence across the globe, helped by the very forces that were supposed to bury it: democracy, globalization, and technology. And despite recent claims that religion is exclusively irrational and violent, its political influence is in fact diverse, sometimes promoting civil war and terrorism but at other times fostering democracy, reconciliation, and peace. Looking across the globe, the authors explain what generates these radically divergent behaviors. In a time when the public discussion of religion is overheated, these dynamic young scholars use deeply original analysis and sharp case studies to show us both how and why religion’s influence on global politics is surging. Finally they offer concrete suggestions on how to both confront the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities posed by globally resurgent religion.

Hearing the Call: Liturgy, Justice, Church, and World

• Eerdmans, December 2011

What is the Word of the Lord for a world of injustice? What does it mean to hear the cries of the oppressed? What does liturgy have to do with justice? These questions have been at the heart of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s work for over forty years. In this collection of essays, he brings together personal, historical, theological, and contemporary perspectives to issue a passionate call to work for justice and peace. An essential complement to his now classic Until Justice and Peace Embrace, the forthcoming Love and Justice, and Justice, this book makes clear why Wolterstorff is one of the church’s most incisive and compelling voices. Between the Times invites us not simply into new ways of thinking, but a transformational way of life.

Justice in Love

Love  and justice   have long been prominent themes in the moral culture of the West, yet they are often considered to be almost hopelessly at odds with one another. In this book acclaimed Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff shows that justice and love are at heart perfectly compatible, and he argues that the commonly perceived tension between them reveals something faulty in our understanding of each. True benevolent love, he says, is always attentive to justice, and love that wreaks injustice can only ever be "malformed love."

Wolterstorff's  Justice in Love  is a welcome companion and follow-up volume to his magnificent  Justice: Rights and Wrongs  (Princeton, 2010). Building upon his expansive discussion of justice in that earlier work and charitably engaging alternative views, this book focuses in profound new ways on the complex yet ultimately harmonious  relation  between justice and love.

Justice: Rights and Wrongs

• Princeton University Press, December 2011

Wide-ranging and ambitious,  Justice  combines moral philosophy and Christian ethics to develop an important theory of rights and of justice as grounded in rights. Nicholas Wolterstorff discusses what it is to have a right, and he locates rights in the respect due the worth of the rights-holder. After contending that socially-conferred rights require the existence of natural rights, he argues that no secular account of natural human rights is successful; he offers instead a theistic account.

Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise

• Kevin Schultz

President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it bluntly, if privately, in 1942: The United States was "a Protestant country," he said, "and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance." In Tri-Faith America, Kevin Schultz explains how the United States left behind this idea that it was "a Protestant nation" and replaced it with a new national image, one premised on the notion that the country was composed of three separate, equally American faiths-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

Tracing the origins of the tri-faith idea to the early twentieth century, when Catholic and Jewish immigration forced Protestant Social Gospelers to combine forces with Catholic and Jewish relief agencies, Tri-Faith America shows how the tri-faith idea gathered momentum after World War I, promoted by public relations campaigns, interfaith organizations, and the government, to the point where, by the end of World War II and into the early years of the Cold War, the idea was becoming widely accepted, particularly in the armed forces, fraternities, neighborhoods, social organizations, and schools. Tri-Faith America also shows how postwar Catholics and Jews used the new image to force the country to confront the challenges of pluralism. Should Protestant bibles be allowed on public school grounds? Should Catholic and Jewish fraternities be allowed to exclude Protestants? Should the government be allowed to count Americans by religion? Challenging the image of the conformist 1950s, Schultz describes how Americans were vigorously debating the merits of recognizing pluralism, paving the way for the civil rights movement and leaving an enduring mark on American culture.

Inquiring about God: Selected Essays, Vol.1.

• Cambridge University Press, December 2010

Inquiring about God is the first of two volumes of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers. This volume collects Wolterstorff's essays on the philosophy of religion written over the last thirty-five years. The essays, which span a range of topics including Kant's philosophy of religion, the medieval (or classical) conception of God, and the problem of evil, are unified by the conviction that some of the central claims made by the classical theistic tradition, such as the claims that God is timeless, simple, and impassible, should be rejected. Still, Wolterstorff contends, rejecting the classical conception of God does not imply that theists should accept the Kantian view according to which God cannot be known. Of interest to both philosophers and theologians, Inquiring about God should give the reader a lively sense of the creative and powerful work done in contemporary philosophical theology by one of its foremost practitioners.

Practices of Belief: Selected Essays, Vol. 2.

Practices of Belief, the second volume of Nicholas Wolterstorff's collected papers, brings together his essays on epistemology from 1983 to 2008. It includes not only the essays which first presented 'Reformed epistemology' to the philosophical world, but also Wolterstorff's latest work on the topic of entitled (or responsible) belief and its intersection with religious belief. The volume presents five new essays and a retrospective essay that chronicles the changes in the course of philosophy over the last fifty years. Of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of religion, and theologians, Practices of Belief should engage a wide audience of those interested in the topic of whether religious belief can be responsibly formed and maintained in the contemporary world.

The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times

Charles t. mathewes.

• Eerdmans, December 2010

With  The Republic of Grace , Charles Mathewes aims to supply a primer of politics and the public square to help Christians in these dark times find hope in public life. He asks such questions as, How should our Christian convictions lead us to see the world differently than those who do not share them? What are the categories that believers should use to act on the challenges of the world?

To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

James davison hunter.

• Oxford University Press, December 2010

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the 21st century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In  To Change the World , James Davison Hunter offers persuasive and provocative answers to these questions.

Understanding Religious Ethics

• December 2010

This accessible introduction to religious ethics focuses on the major forms of moral reasoning encompassing the three ‘Abrahamic’ religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Open Friendship in a Closed Society Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship

• Oxford University Press, December 2009

Mission Mississippi is the largest interracial ecumenical church-based racial reconciliation group in the United States. Peter Slade offers a sustained examination of whether the Mission's model of racial reconciliation (which stresses one-on-one, individual friendships among religious people of different races) can effectively address the issue of social justice. Slade argues that Mission Mississippi's goal of "changing Mississippi one relationship at a time" is both a pragmatic strategy and a theological statement of hope for social and economic change in Mississippi. Carefully tracing the organization's strategies of biracial church partnerships and sponsorships of large civic events, and intercessory prayer breakfast groups, he concludes that they do indeed offer hope for not only for racial reconciliation but for enabling the mobilization of white economic and social power to benefit broad-based community development. At the same time, he honestly conveys the considerable obstacles to the success of these strategies. Slade's work comes out of the vibrant Lived Theology movement, which looks at the ways theologies go beyond philosophical writings to an embodiment in the grassroots lives of religious people. Drawing on extensive interviews and observations of Mission Mississippi activities, church sources, and theological texts, this book is important not only for scholars of theology and race relations but also Southern studies and religious studies.

Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University

In shaping the modern academy and in setting the agenda of modern Christian theology, few institutions have been as influential as the German universities of the nineteenth century. This book examines the rise of the modern German university from the standpoint of the Protestant theological faculty, focusing especially on the University of Berlin (1810), Prussia's flagship university in the nineteenth century. In contradistinction to historians of modern higher education who often overlook theology, and to theologians who are frequently inattentive to the social and institutional contexts of religious thought, Thomas Albert Howard argues that modern university development and the trajectory of modern Protestant theology in Germany should be understood as interrelated phenomena.

Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity

• Brazos Press, December 2009

In this groundbreaking and provocative book, Jonathan Malesic argues that the best way for Christians to be caretakers of their tradition and to love their neighbors selflessly is to conceal their religious identity in American public life. The alternative--insisting on Christianity's public visibility in politics, the marketplace, and the workplace--risks severely compromising the distinctiveness of Christian identity.

Delving deep into the Christian tradition, Malesic explains that keeping Christian identity secret means living fully in the world while maintaining Christian language, prayer, and liturgy in reserve. He shows how major thinkers--Cyril of Jerusalem, Søren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer--sought to protect Christian identity from being compromised by the public sphere. He then shows that Christians' dual responsibilities for the tradition and for the neighbor must be kept secret.

The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right

• Jon A. Shields
• Princeton University Press, December 2009

The Christian Right is frequently accused of threatening democratic values. But in  The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right , Jon Shields argues that religious conservatives have in fact dramatically increased and improved democratic participation and that they are far more civil and reasonable than is commonly believed.

Shields interviewed leaders of more than thirty Christian Right organizations, observed movement activists in six American cities, and analyzed a wide variety of survey data and movement media. His conclusions are surprising: the Christian Right has reinvigorated American politics and fulfilled New Left ideals by mobilizing a previously alienated group and by refocusing politics on the contentious ideological and moral questions that motivate citizens. Shields also finds that, largely for pragmatic reasons, the vast majority of Christian Right leaders encourage their followers to embrace deliberative norms in the public square, including civility and secular reasoning.

At the same time, Shields highlights a tension between participatory and deliberative ideals since Christian Right leaders also nurture moral passions, prejudices, and dogmas to propel their movement. Nonetheless, the Christian Right's other democratic virtues help contain civic extremism, sharpen the thinking of activists, and raise the level and tenor of political debate for all Americans.

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments

Jennifer l. geddes.

• Palgrave Macmillan, December 2009

The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust advances the idea that the Holocaust undermined confidence in basic beliefs about human rights and shows steps of salvage and retrieval that need to be taken if ethics is to be a significant presence in a world still besieged by genocide and atrocity.

Prophesies of Godlessness: Predications of America’s Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day

• Oxford University Press, December 2008

Prophesies of Godlessness  explains patterns in how Americans, from the Puritans to the present, have imagined and disseminated prophesies for and against "godlessness." The book identifies and analyzes surprising continuities among those prophesies throughout American history and among thinkers of surprisingly diverse political and religious views.

Race: A Theological Account

• J. Kameron Carter

In  Race: A Theological Account , J. Kameron Carter meditates on the multiple legacies implicated in the production of a racialized world and that still mark how we function in it and think about ourselves. These are the legacies of colonialism and empire, political theories of the state, anthropological theories of the human, and philosophy itself, from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the present.

A Theology of Public Life

• Cambridge University Press, December 2007

What has Washington to do with Jerusalem? In the raging debates about the relationship between religion and politics, no one has explored the religious benefits and challenges of public engagement for Christian believers - until now. This book defends and details Christian believers' engagement in contemporary pluralistic public life not from the perspective of some neutral 'public', but from the particular perspective of Christian faith, arguing that such engagement enriches both public life and Christian citizens' faith themselves. As such it offers not a 'public theology', but a 'theology of public life', analysing the promise and perils of Christian public engagement, discussing the nature of civic commitment and prophetic critique, and the relation of a loving faith to a liberal politics of justice. Theologically rich, philosophically rigorous, politically, historically and sociologically informed, this book advances contemporary discussion of 'religion and public life' in fundamental ways

The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism

• Abdulaziz Sachedina
• Oxford University Press, December 2007

This book tackles the most significant issues facing Muslims today. Sachedina argues that we must reopen the doors of religious interpretation—to correct false interpretations, replace outdated laws, and formulate new doctrines. Sachedina’s book critically analyzes Muslim teachings on such issues as pluralism, civil society, war and peace, and violence and self-sacrifice.

The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics

• Georgetown University Press, December 2007

Promoting Islam as a defender of human rights is laden with difficulties. Advocates of human rights will readily point out numerous humanitarian failures carried out in the name of Islam. In  The Rights of God , Irene Oh looks at human rights and Islam as a religious issue rather than a political or legal one and draws on three revered Islamic scholars to offer a broad range of perspectives that challenge our assumptions about the role of religion in human rights.

Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference

• Kristen Deede Johnson

How can we live together in the midst of our differences? This is one of the most pressing questions of our time. Tolerance has been the bedrock of political liberalism, while proponents of agonistic political thought and radical democracy have sought an answer that allows a deeper celebration of difference. Kristen Deede Johnson describes the move from tolerance to difference, and the accompanying move from epistemology to ontology, within political theory. Building on this 'ontological turn', in search of a theological answer to the question, she puts Augustine into conversation with recent political theorists and theologians. This theological option enables the Church to envision a way to engage with contemporary political society without losing its own embodied story and practices. It contributes to our broader political imagination by offering a picture of rich engagement between the many different particularities that constitute a pluralist society.

Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction

• Justin S. Holcomb
• New York University Press, December 2006

Christian Theologies of Scripture , edited by Justin S. Holcomb, traces what the theological giants have said about scripture from the early days of Christianity until today. It incorporates diverse discussions about the nature of scripture, its authority, and its interpretation, providing a guide to the variety of views about the Bible throughout the Christian tradition.

The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post–Communist Poland

• Geneviève Zubrzycki
• The University of Chicago Press, December 2006

In the summer and fall of 1998, ultranationalist Polish Catholics erected hundreds of crosses outside Auschwitz, setting off a fierce debate that pitted Catholics and Jews against one another. While this controversy had ramifications that extended well beyond Poland’s borders, Geneviève Zubrzycki sees it as a particularly crucial moment in the development of post-Communist Poland’s statehood and its changing relationship to Catholicism. 

Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying to Bridge America

• Paul Lichterman
• Princeton University Press, December 2005

Combining insights from Alexis de Tocqueville, John Dewey, and Jane Addams with contemporary sociology,  Elusive Togetherness  addresses enduring questions about civic and religious life that elude the popular "social capital" concept. To create broad civic relationships, groups need more than the right religious values, political beliefs, or resources. They must learn new ways of being groups.

Evangelical Feminism: A History

• December 2005

Evangelical Feminism offers the first history of the evangelical feminist movement. It traces the emergence and theological development of biblical feminism within evangelical Christianity in the 1970s, how an internal split among members of the movement came about over the question of lesbianism, and what these developments reveal about conservative Protestantism and religion generally in contemporary America. Cochran shows that biblical feminists have been at the center of changes both within evangelicalism and in American culture more broadly by renegotiating the religious symbols which shape its deepest values.

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans  examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws, statutes that created a racial caste system in the American South. The book fills a gap in the scholarship on religion and race in the crucial decades between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of the Civil Rights movement.

Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832

• Robert G. Ingram

Through a series of studies focusing on individuals, this volume highlights the continued importance of religion and religious identity on British life throughout the long eighteenth century. From the Puritan divine and scholar Roger Morrice, active at the beginning of the period, to Dean Shipley who died in the reign of George IV, the individuals chosen chart a shifting world of enlightenment and revolution whilst simultaneously reaffirming the tremendous influence that religion continued to bring to bear.

The Catholic Church in State Politics: Negotiating Prophetic Demands and Political Realities

• David Yamane
• Rowman & Littlefield, December 2005

In this groundbreaking work, David Yamane reveals the rich history, accomplishments, and challenges of bishops and their lay colleagues in local politics. Through sociological analysis, up-to-date examples, and personal interviews, Yamane explains how the local Catholic advocacy organizations in thirty-three states and Washington, D.C., negotiate the tension between the prophetic demands of faith and the political realities of secular political institutions.  The Catholic Church in State Politics  invites readers to understand better the role of religion in the public square.

Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands

• Bradford W. Wilcox
• The University of Chicago Press, December 2004

In the wake of dramatic, recent changes in American family life, evangelical and mainline Protestant churches took markedly different positions on family change. This work explains why these two traditions responded so differently to family change and then goes on to explore how the stances of evangelical and mainline Protestant churches toward marriage and parenting influenced the husbands and fathers that fill their pews.

The Future of the Study of Religion: Proceedings of Congress 2000

Slavica jakelic.

• Brill, December 2004

This volume brings together diverse voices from various fields within religious and theological studies for a conversation about the proper objects, goals, and methods for the study of religion in the twenty-first century. It approaches these questions by way of the most recent contemporary challenges, debates, and developments in the field, and provides a forum in which contending perspectives are tested and contested by their proponents and opponents. Contributors address topics such as: the connection between the normative and the scientific approaches to the study of religion, the meaning of religion in a context of globalization, the relation between religious studies and religious traditions, the viability of comparative and cultural studies of religious phenomena, and the future of gender studies in religion.

Evil after Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives and Ethics

• Routledge, December 2001

These six essays form a stimulating and lucid investigation of the meaning of evil in the light of postmodern thought, and of the cultural and social changes of the modern age. They consider subjects such as the war in Bosnia, AIDS, and the Holocaust.

Evil and the Augustinian Tradition

• Cambridge University Press, December 2001

Evil and the Augustinian Tradition explores the "family biography" of the Augustinian tradition by looking at Augustine's work and its development in the writings of Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr. Mathewes argues that the Augustinian tradition offers us a powerful, though commonly misconstrued, proposal for understanding and responding to evil's challenges. The book casts new light on Augustine, Niebuhr, and Arendt, as well as on the problem of evil, the nature of tradition, and the role of theological and ethical discourse in contemporary thought.

Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way

• Kimon Sargeant
• Rutgers University Press, December 2000

America’s religious landscape is in flux. New churches are springing up and many older churches are redefining themselves to survive. At the forefront of this denominational free-for-all are evangelical “seeker” churches.Through eyewitness accounts and careful research, Sargeant reveals the “seeker” movement to be a “reformation” of American Protestantism.

Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation

• University of Chicago Press, December 1987

Largely because of a superficiality of interest and a narrowness of intellectual concern, a good deal of misunderstanding continues to surround the religiocultural phenomenon of American Evangelicalism. To most, it still represents a cultural dinosaur that somehow survived into the twentieth century. Unbelievably, it not only survives but in many respects even thrives.

Regina Schwartz: “Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare”: Public Lecture

Past Events • Public Lecture • 4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.

Join us February 23 for a public lecture featuring Regina Mara Schwartz (English, Northwestern University) based on her latest book, Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare .

The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy: Robert Woodberry

Friday Seminar • Past Events • Noon–2:00 p.m.

"Follow the Money" & "Choosing Against our Chosenness": Public Lectures by Walter Brueggemann

Past Events • 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

Walter Brueggeman, William Marcellus McPheeters professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, will give a lecture at 11:00 a.m. titled "Follow the Money" that reviews the ways the bible characteristically responds to "an economy of extraction" and proposes alternatives to such practice. Lunch will be available for purchase after the lecture.

A second lecture, "Choosing Against our Chosenness," will consist of Brueggemann's reflections on the way in which chosenness (ancient Israel, the Church, the USA or whites) tilts regularly toward violence. will follow lunch at 1:30 p.m. Dr. Brueggemann's recent books will be available for purchase.

Religious Liberty: Rita Hermon-Belot

Friday Seminar • Past Events • Noon–2:00 p.m. on July 8th

Religion and Philanthropy

Fellows Reading Group • Past Events • Noon–2:00 p.m.

Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion: Matthew Scherer (George Mason University)

Asher biemann.

• Professor of Religious Studies
• Associate Fellow

Nichole M. Flores

• Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
• Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia

Larycia Hawkins

• Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
• Publisher, The Hedgehog Review
• LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory, U. of Virginia

Alan Jacobs

• Member, The Council Trust
• Senior Fellow
• Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Valparaiso University

Andrew Lynn

• Research Fellow
• Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
• Assistant Professor of Theology, Creighton University.

Murray Milner

• Senior Fellow (Passed)
• Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Virginia

Cassandra Nelson

Matthew puffer, benjamin schewel, regina schwartz.

• Professor of English, Northwestern University

Christian Smith

• Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society
• William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame
• Member, Advisory Board

Mark Storslee

• Associate Professor of Law, Pennsylvania State University

Ufuk Topkara

Modernity, Post-Modernity and Late Modernity

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Some of the Key Features of Modernity and Post-Late Modernity and Modern, Post-Modern and Late Modern Thought. 

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Guest Essay

Jack Smith Owes Us an Explanation

By Jack Goldsmith

Mr. Goldsmith was an assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and is a co-author of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.”

Last week a judge unsealed a 165-page redacted legal brief with damaging revelations about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The revelations have been widely discussed and debated — but the timing of the release should receive more scrutiny, because the Department of Justice should not have allowed the information to be disclosed so close to Election Day. This event is the latest of many examples of Biden administration officials paying insufficient public attention to executive branch rules that are designed to ensure that prosecutions are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically.

The special counsel Jack Smith’s two prosecutions against Mr. Trump — for election resistance and for misappropriating and mishandling classified documents — are the first against a former president. They are also the first by an executive branch whose top officials — once Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris — have been running for president against the target of the administration’s prosecution. It is much more vital in this context than ever before for the executive branch to take scrupulous care to assure the public that the prosecutions are conducted in compliance with pertinent rules.

On this score, Mr. Smith has failed. The brief he recently filed sought to show that the election prosecution can continue despite the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. It laid out the government’s case against Mr. Trump with what many media reports described as bombshell new details about his wrongdoing. The filing is in clear tension with the Justice Department’s 60-day rule, which the department inspector general has described as a “longstanding department practice of delaying overt investigative steps or disclosures that could impact an election” within 60 days of it. However, the rule is unwritten and, as the inspector general made clear, has an uncertain scope.

The Justice Department does not believe it is violating this or any other rule. It expressed no concern about Judge Tanya Chutkan’s proposal to set the brief deadline close to the election or to reveal the information publicly in her discretion. (She made clear that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had not shown that her court is “bound by or has jurisdiction to enforce Department of Justice policy.”) Perhaps the department thinks the new disclosures are marginal and won’t affect the election or that the rule does not apply to litigation steps in previously indicted cases, even if they would affect the election.

But the department has not publicly justified its actions in the election prosecution, and its failure to do so in this highest-of-stakes context is a mistake.

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