Polemics concerning science and religion continue to the present, notably in the writings of Richard Dawkins (also listed by McEwan in his canon) and Sam Harris on one side, and John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins on the other.
Gottfried W. Locher writes, "The old assertion 'Zwingli was against church singing' holds good no longer ... Zwingli's polemic is concerned exclusively with the medieval Latin choral and priestly chanting and not with the hymns of evangelical congregations or choirs".
For me, the issues that arise from the Gospels are not due to the perceived "outlandish" nature of the text and events described within, but with people like you (journalist, "scholars") who seem to try and insert, arbitrarily, the scaffolding of science, rhetoric, and polemics into discussions concerning Christ, his life, and his legacy.
He was the first to doubt the significance of nonconstructive existence proofs (proofs that show something must exist, often by using a proof through contradiction, but that give no method of producing them), and for many years he carried on a polemic against the analytic school of the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass concerning these proofs and other points of classical analysis.
While he enters into extended polemics in various essays and journal articles of the late 1940s and '50s concerning the systematic exploitation of people in capitalist and colonialist institutions, Sartre always sought a way to bring the responsibility home to individuals who could in principle be named.
The polemic is presented as one of conflict among the canon lawyers and theologians at Paris concerning the reception of Aristotle and recent works on Greek and Arabic sciences, especially astronomy/astrology.
The satiric mode of literature set the tone for popular polemics such as the "fool" satires of Thomas Murner, a Catholic adversary of Martin Luther: Die Geuchmat (1519; "Field of Fools") and Von dem grossen Lutherischen Narren (1522; "Concerning the Great Lutheran Fool").
Stepping back from the Cohen versus Rawls polemic (on which, see Williams 1998, Pogge 2000, Scheffler 2006, and Shiffrin 2010), we should note that any theory of egalitarian justice must indicate how its requirements for institutions and practices mesh with its views concerning what justice requires of individuals.
Though Springsteen has many topical songs, in a recent interview with Variety he expressed reluctance about writing anything too explicitly political for the new show rock music, he suggested, should not be overly concerned with polemics, but with narrating interior landscapes.
But where Green Day's American Idiot was something of a polemic, American Slang is a more internal record, concerned with standing one's ground, mulling over bygones and fretting over girls.
