Thunder Rd. street sign

I am a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, so it’s no surprise that I’m anxiously counting down the days until this Sunday when I’ll get to see him and the E-Street Band in concert at the Scottrade Center.

In addition to writing some of the best lines ever in rock and roll music, in the song Thunder Road Springsteen is  responsible for what I think may be the most honest - albeit horribly conceived - pick-up line ever:

“You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re alright.”

Of course, he follows it up with the reassuring, “And that’s all right with me,” which brings some level of humility to the whole thing and somehow makes the statement actually seem kind of sweet, in a naïve way (since I don’t think that the narrator is speaking grudgingly but rather that he genuinely means that her appearance is okay with him).

Still, I can’t imagine…

An artist's rendering of Joseph Smith's first vision

Karen Armstrong, a popular historian of religion whose bestselling A History of God brought her to national prominence in 1993, is back in the news. Her new book, The Case for God, revisits some familiar  territory in a stimulating survey of Western religious history, but this time Armstrong packages her message in an admonition to both conservative Christians and bellicose atheists, mutual antagonists in the cultural skirmishes over religion.  The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Armstrong and Richard Dawkins, the most outspoken of the new atheists, to respond to the question, “Where does evolution leave God?” (one wonders why they did not also include an informed representative of conservative religion in their symposium).  The two answers were published together, and they make a most interesting study in contrast. Armstrong uses the platform to reprise the argument of her new book:

In the past, many of the most…