Harold O.J. Brown

Theologian Harold O.J. Brown (1933-2007) was the religion editor of Chronicles until his death this past July. This article was drawn from Chapter 13 (“Crisis and Resolution”) of his final book, The Sensate Culture, published in 1996. The Sensate Culture itself was drawn from Dr. Brown’s observations and elaborations on the work of Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889-1968), particularly his 1941 book The Crisis of Our Age.

Latest by Harold O.J. Brown in Chronicles

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December 2007

The Conversion of a Culture: Crisis and Resolution

Can an entire culture “be converted”—i.e., turn away from entrenched patterns of selfishness and self-indulgence and replace them with patterns of altruism?
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June 2007

Protestantism, America, and Divine Law

Since the time of the Founding Fathers, Protestantism appeared to be the default religion in the United States.
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Cultural Revolutions

September 2005

Judge Roberts

As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.
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August 2005

Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forces

In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12).
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March 2005

No Graven Images

In the fourth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, Satan tempts Jesus with the offer of “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.”
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January 2005

Honor to Whom Honor

“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB).
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Cultural Revolutions

April 2004

Civil Unions

Civil unions, which offer same-sex couples the privileges that presently accrue to those who have been united in normal marriages, have been discussed by several legislators since the MassachusettsSupreme Judiciary Court ordered the state legislature to establish “homosexual marriage.”
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Vital Signs

October 2003

Remembering the Covenant

During his term as president, Jimmy Carter, then a Southern Baptist, called for a White House Conference on Families in order to redefine family as any group of humans living together—so general a definition that college roommates or even a military platoon could be considered a family.
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Vital Signs

November 2002

God, Man, and Family

The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27).
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April 2002

Two Trails of Blood

The spread of Christianity was marked by a trail of blood, shed by myriad martyrs during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Another trail of blood followed: that of the Christian defenders of the Roman Empire, shed by Arabian Muslims in the course of their conquest of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain.
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Reviews

October 2001

New Skins, Old Wine

For almost 2,000 years, Christians have been confessing Jesus Christ as God and Savior in the assurance that they knew enough about Him to justify making this confession.
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September 2001

Sic et Non?

A number of years ago, when I was teaching a ninth-grade religion class (in Switzerland, where religion is taught in public schools), one of the boys said to me, "All religions teach the same thing."
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Reviews

June 2001

Come, Sweet Death

In the spring of 1975, C. Everett Koop, M.D., addressed a conference of Christian laymen in New Orleans on the topic of abortion—more specifically, on the implications of Roe V. Wade.
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Cultural Revolutions

June 2001

Not Absolutely Evil

Human beings cannot be absolutely evil, according to Christian theology, because they are made in the image of God; though fallen, they always retain an awareness of good and evil.
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Cultural Revolutions

May 2001

A Functioning Foreign Policy

The United States always seem to need someone to demonize in order to have a functioning foreign policy. Now that Hitler, Stalin, and the "Evil Empire" are dead and gone, we have to make do with such lesser devils as Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin-Laden.
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Round Table Discussion

January 2001

Christianity and the Legitimacy of Government

The late Paul J. Tillich (1886-1965)—not exactly a hero to conservative Christians, Protestant or Catholic—spoke of the rival impulses that cause agony in personal and community decisionmaking, which he defined as the clash between autonomy and heteronomy.
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December 2000

Tradition, Old and New

As a starting point, we must distinguish between tradition as container and tradition as content. This is a difference between the positions of the two great confessional bodies which appear equally devoted to preserving their traditions.
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Vital Signs

October 2000

Dare to Be a Daniela

In early July, the United States Supreme Court, acting on a plea brought by two unidentified families, one Mormon and one Roman Catholic, ruled the practice of prayer at high-school football games unconstitutional.
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Reviews

March 2000

Shifting Ground

Kenneth Miller has produced a beautifully written work. His book is intended to refute every objection to the more or less universally accepted doctrine of evolution, to discredit its opponents, and to assert the compatibility of strict evolutionary doctrine with religion.
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Reviews

February 2000

Our Heads Cut Off

This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he believes is related to the perversion of mathematics, a topic that he explored in an earlier book.
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