I STILL REMEMBER the day at the end of sixth grade when I came home from school and saw the cover of the latest issue of Time, with no picture, just huge red letters against a plain black background: IS GOD DEAD? I didn’t read it at the time, but it pleased me. Finally, the official publication of upper-middle Americanism was ratifying what the smart people knew but were too polite to say in public: in the modern world, religion had reached its sell-by date. That 1966 story, written by a pious Roman Catholic who later became an editor of mine at Time, is a rueful, reasonable, intellectually
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