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For many working-class and poor families, extended-family visits are the organizing principle of social life. According to the 2002 General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 41 percent of poor and working-class people spend a social evening with their relatives often, from once a week to as much as every day.And here:
For many middle-class children, however, visits with relatives are infrequent. Instead of spending time with aunts, uncles and cousins, hectic schedules of soccer games, piano lessons, basketball practice and other activities are the organizing force of daily life.
Too often, the better-off view those who have less than them only in terms of what they can offer, or even teach, the poor. During this holiday season, it would do many Americans good to consider what they can learn from the poor and working class about family, connection and taking time to be.
[Doubt's] demarcation from faith is not as precise as these descriptions suggest. Doubt can become a rigid orthodoxy in its own right. In contemporary life, as Ms. Hecht seems to know, doubt has become almost axiomatic (as if it were a matter of faith).
Meanwhile faith itself is riddled with doubt. As Ms. Hecht points out, many religious texts (like Job or Augustine's "Confessions") are also accounts of doubt.
In his recent book, "The Transformation of American Religion" (Free Press, $26), the sociologist Alan Wolfe suggests that evangelical Christians in the United States cannot be thought of as they once were. Religion, he argues, has been transformed by American culture to become therapeutic, individualistic and less interested in doctrine than in faith.
Nor is faith always unreasonable. Religious beliefs were fundamental to the abolition of slavery in the 19th century and to the civil rights movement in the 20th. Faith may even be latent in some of science's triumphs, inspiring such figures as Newton and Kepler. The conviction that there is an order to things, that the mind can comprehend that order and that this order is not infinitely malleable, those scientific beliefs may include elements of faith.
Reason also has its own problems. Isaiah Berlin argued that the Enlightenment led to the belief that human beings could be reshaped according to reason's dictates. And out of that science of human society, he argued, came such totalitarian dystopias as the Soviet Union. Reason then, has its limits.
Some of those questions may remain even after contemporary battles cease: how much faith is involved in the workings of reason and how much reason lies in the assertions of faith?
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