I was up at Boston College yesterday for an “author meets critics” session on Damon Linker’s provocative new book, The Religious Test, hosted by the Boisi Center. The other critic was Patrick Deneen of Georgetown, and the pregame chatter was about Jody Bottum’s summary dismissal as editor of First Things, for reasons that allegedly had…

Let me put in a plug for George Dennis O’Brien’s new book, The Church and Abortion: A Catholic Dissent. No doubt that last word will immediately cause many pro-life Catholics to turn away without a second thought. But as my friend Michael Sean Winters likes to emphasize about himself (e.g. here), it’s often from people…

Like Josh Marshall, I’ve been pondering the Gallup finding that Catholics are significantly more likely than “Protestants/Other Christians” to favor finding another location for the Park51 Islamic Center. Given that Protestants in the aggregate are, on most public issues, more conservative than Catholics–and given that American Catholics tend to recollect their own disfavored religious status…

The president’s Gandhian pilgrimage to India has got me thinking about the way prominent Indian-Americans tend to efface their religious past. OK, so maybe there was no way Bobby Jindal could have gotten elected governor of Louisiana as a Hindu or Nikki Haley governor of South Carolina as a Sikh. But what about comedian Aziz…

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.

read full bio
More from Beliefnet and our partners
More from Beliefnet and our partners
Close Ad