Sublime

go listen to his Saint Matthew Passion or Mass in B Minor, the piece I am listening to as I write these words. You will understand why some call him the “Fifth Evangelist.” Bach’s

But in spite of the shortcomings of his analysis, Marx had raised some basic questions. I was deeply concerned from my early teen days about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty, and my reading of Marx made me ever more conscious of this gulf. Although modern American capitalism had greatly reduced the gap through social reforms,

The crucified Christ himself is a challenge to Christian theology and the Christian church, which dare to call themselves by his name.

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

Martin Luther King Jr. used the power of forgiveness, as developed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, to inspire those in the civil rights movement to act in elevated ways that would win hearts and minds: We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good

John Milton—later the author of Paradise Lost—published a pamphlet in which he argued against a law passed by Parliament requiring printers to secure licenses from the government for everything they printed. No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be establ

would not be going too far to say that ‘Paul, and not Jesus, was … the Founder of Christianity’,20 and therein lie the origins of Christian heresy: ‘Paul is, in effect, the first “Christian” heretic, and his teachings – which became the foundation of later Christianity – are a flagrant deviation from the “original” or “pure” form.’21 He is the ‘fir