Word: millers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...widely prevalent and intellectually debilitating relativism" of American life, writes Presbyterian William Lee Miller, Yale Divinity School professor, religion is being spiritually sapped. For Americans religion is apt to be "the belief in believing, the faith in faith"-exemplified by the radio program called This I Believe, which had "plenty of 'believe' and quite a bit of 'I' but not very much of 'this.' " There is an inclination to hold almost all positions to be equally valuable and true...
Religion-in-General. The loss of so-called absolutes is not the problem. "It is rather the disappearance of trust in the proposition that the mind and conscience are capable of making any genuine discriminations at all." Nor, as Dr. Miller sees it, is anti-intellectualism at the heart of the matter. "It is not that we do not have enough respect for other people called intellectuals; it is that we do not have enough respect for our own intellects...
...positive thinking" and "official Washington piety," says Dr. Miller, the justifications are "sincerity" and the vast ''numbers of people who respond favorably." What Americans are driving toward "is a shallow and implicitly compulsory common creed ... It is epitomized in the patriotic-religious pronouncements of the President and the Joint Chiefs' effort to formulate an ideology ('militant liberty') for us all." It is "a religion-in-general, superficial and syncretistic, destructive of the profounder elements of faith...
Overextended Virtues. Summing up, Yale's Dr. Miller notes that most of the faults in the American system of religious pluralism are "closely related to the merits of the free society. They remain problems because they are linked to the very nature of freedom." Pragmatism, relativism, drives against dissent, the churches' preoccupation with social reform instead of spiritual matters-all have their good side; in each case, "the fault is the overextension of virtue...
...still unique problems of religion in a free society, concludes Dr. Miller, there is one answer: "The retention, restatement and recapture of that transcendent dimension, for something like it is necessary if a society is to recognize the claims of both truth and liberty without allowing either to destroy the other...