The State We're In

I note the most recent issue of Crucible: The Christian Journal of Social Ethics (April-June 2009), which has a set of essays on the present relationship of church and state in Britain, including one by Peter Hennessy.
Unfortunately, the journal seems to have no web presence at all, so I am unable to provide any links.

Seeking a Role

I note the appearance of a new general survey of the period from 1951 to 1970 by Brian Harrison, which has some things to say about religious change (published by Oxford University Press). One of his organising motifs is apparently the strained negotiations between 'secularized materialism' and older values derived from the Christian past. It is reviewed very favourably by Peter Hennessy in the TLS, May 6th, and by Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times.
See earlier post on Hugh McLeod's book on the Sixties.

John Rawls' religion

I note briefly this piece in the TLS (March 18th) on some early work by Rawls on Christianity and the nature of social organisation, and its imprint on his later work, even after his own loss of faith.

Although it is written in and about the US, there are some interesting parallels with the English situation in the early 1940s, in relation to thinking on issues of community and the individual. A longer version is to appear in Cohen and Nagel (eds), John Rawls: 'A brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith', to be published by Harvard.