Religion: Too Much Central Heating?

Murdo Ewen Macdonald remembers his first West of Scotland congregation—on the Isle of Skye—as "very churched people. The acids of the modern temper haven't corroded them much."

Last week Presbyterian Macdonald, 36, now pastor of Edinburgh's St. George's West Church, told Americans how to clean up the kind of corrosion he has found outside the Isle of Skye. To a big midsummer congregation in Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and to students at Union Theological Seminary, he gave the same message: "The thing wrong with religion today the world over, and especially in America, is that it is too centrally heated,...