As yesterday’s public letter from 400 rabbis declares, Glenn Beck’s promiscuous use of Holocaust and Nazi imagery to characterize those with whom he disagrees is disgraceful, and perhaps the recent outcry against the use of such imagery will tamp it down. But Beck’s effort to discredit George Soros by painting the financier of liberal causes…

You’ve got Rep. Peter King, who after 9/11 turned his back on his Muslim constituents, once his friends, and is now leading a GOP congressional charge against radical Islam in the American population, claiming, “We are under siege by Muslim terrorists.” You’ve got Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s grand pooh-bah of religious liberty, withdrawing…

Over at Religion Dispatches, Shalom Goldman is the latest Jewish writer to try to kill off “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” Inspired by a new “Judeo-Christian Voter Guide,” he resuscitates the claim that the phrase does little more than paper over the long history of Jewish-Christian animosity, subordinating Jewish distinctiveness to ecumenical public relations. In a study…

“All men are brothers” is an assertion of our common humanity. So it seemed like a rejection of it for Alabama’s newly elected governor to restrict his own brotherhood to fellow Christians–or, more accurately, to fellow evangelicals. When you say, as Gov. Robert Bentley did, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as…

Mark Silk
about

Mark Silk

Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.

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