I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad””not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys.

Take, for instance, the recently published 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists. Simple probability, surely, would seem to dictate that a collection of essays by fifty fairly intelligent and zealous atheists would contain at least one logically compelling, deeply informed, morally profound, or conceptually arresting argument for not believing in God. Certainly that was my hope in picking it up. Instead, I came away from the whole drab assemblage of preachments and preenings feeling rather as if I had just left a large banquet at which I had been made to dine entirely on crushed ice and water vapor.

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed….

Read the whole article from First Things.

Let us sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and trees and things of that sort, what we call the Laws of Nature may not be anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is governed by certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in a certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything real-anything above and beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in the case of Man, we saw that this will not do. The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else-a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

–C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Chastity is another central tenet of the Jesuit lifestyle, and Martin explains its benefits in his book.

“Chastity is not for everyone and most people tend to define it negatively,” he says. “I.e., chastity means not having sex. But I define it positively, and I say that chastity means loving many people very deeply and very freely. And people feel free with a person who’s chaste, really. Because they know that you’re not being friends with them or being close to them for sex.”

But celibacy has taken a hit in recent years, as reports of priests sexually assaulting children came out. Martin says he doesn’t see a connection between the two.

“I would say that that’s more related to people who are psychologically unhealthy and also, bishops who have moved priests around ”” that’s not directly related to chastity,” Martin says. “I don’t think ”” celibacy and chastity do not cause pedophilia. No more than ”” most sexual abuse goes on in families, no more than marriage causes sexual abuse.”

Caught this one by podcast in the morning run. Listen to it all (about 6 1/4 minutes)–KSH.

The new year began for me badly ”” with a thick head cold and one of those artfully written novels that start off with a lot of beguiling razmatazz and turn out to be about nothing. The novel in question, The Privileges, chronicles 20 years in the life of a golden couple who never lose their luster. Other critics have rightly enthused over the novel’s evocation of the world of the New York mega-rich, but I found myself growing crankier with every passing chapter in which very little of substance happened. By frustrating narrative expectations, The Privileges certainly makes readers conscious of the cliched plot lines we carry around in our heads, but my poor head was too congested for games. I wanted a dose of diverting plot, and interesting characters, and a point, along with my Nyquil.

That’s just when Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new novel appeared like an answer to a fevered prayer. Ever since her 1983 debut, The Mind-Body Problem, Goldstein has marked out a singular space for herself in the world of contemporary fiction. A philosopher by training, (she holds a Ph.D. from Princeton), Goldstein writes about what happens when worlds collide: the realms of the ethereal vs. the everyday; of erudition vs. gut instinct; of ration vs. lust. Her novels tackle the Big Questions of Life and unapologetically reference philosophers like Spinoza and William James. Best of all, Goldstein gets away with this high-hatting because she’s so funny and she knows how to tell an engrossing story. When you have as much gleeful gravitas as Goldstein, you don’t have to find quirky ways to show off.

Read or listen to it all.

Check it out if you have yet to do so.

In the brief reading we had Jesus asked a question: ”˜what is the kingdom of God like?’ He gives two suggestions by way of an answer. He said ”˜It is like a tiny seed that a man sowed and in time it became a huge tree’. Then he said again: ”˜The Kingdom of heaven is like a woman who takes flour and yeast and from the leavening of the two an invisible, chemical change creates something wholly new’. In both parables Jesus is saying something like this: ”˜from the tiniest of events the most staggering mysteries can appear’.

Of course, human beings quite rightly do not like mysteries. We want to get to the bottom of things and we ask questions of mysteries.

This year our country is celebrating the achievements of one of the greatest scientists of all time; Charles Darwin. Born two hundred years ago he was from childhood a person with a profound sense of curiosity. He was an inveterate collector. His father wanted him to follow him into the medical profession- but he knew he wasn’t cut out for that. He went to university thinking that he ought to be ordained ”“ but, deep down, he knew that wasn’t his destiny.
Almost by accident he heard about the voyage of a ship, the Beagle, which needed a naturalist. He got the job and the five years he spent on the ship was to change him and change the world. Above all, he got people thinking and arguing about God. And Darwin himself was shaken by what he discovered. In 1859, 150 years ago, his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, was published. He showed that the earth was in constant flux and that every species was interdependent; human beings too were part of creation and linked to other creatures. There is an astonishing diagram in one of his notebooks sketching the tree of life with the two words above the diagram ”˜I think’. He argued in his book that a process he called natural selection was at work in all life with survival dependent upon adaptability to change . Called ”˜the survival of the fittest’ Darwin challenged religious and philosophical thinking of his day.

I can only give you my personal take on this. If you believe that the opening chapters of Genesis are literally true, then Darwin’s colossal achievement will contradict you. If you believe, as I do, that the opening chapters of Genesis are allegories, pictures stories that belong to ancient peoples’ attempts to understand creation, then there is no difficulty for Christians seeing Darwin’s discoveries as enlarging their understanding of the universe.

Read it all.

When she was 20, Jessi Thull’s father died of cancer, an event that took seven months from diagnosis to death, and that she describes now as “overwhelming.”

Thull was brought up as a church-going Christian, but her father’s death and the resulting pain made her question God’s existence. “I had no sense as to how there could be a good God who would just watch as a family falls apart,” she said.

Thull, now 26 and reconciled with God, was examining her skepticism recently as part of a program at The Journey, a popular evangelical church in south St. Louis that is taking dead aim at the resurging popularity of doubt and skepticism in American society.

Read it all.

Apologetics has largely lost its place in mainline seminary curricula. But the task of apologetics””making Christian belief intelligible””remains inescapable. If it isn’t done well, it will be done badly.
The postmodern claim that all truth is relative to a context or tradition has created a new situation for apologetics. All that postmodern apologists need to do is show that their opponents also stand in a particular tradition that has its own unverifiable presuppositions. Science, for example, rests on presuppositions like this one: “The world is governed by natural forces and everything can be explained if we understand these natural forces.” This is a philosophical presupposition that is not falsifiable and therefore not subject to scientific inquiry.

Postmodern apologists can be divided into two schools, the humble and the bold. The humble apologists simply want to argue that the Christian way of life is the most desirable way of life, on the basis of the kinds of people that the belief system fosters. If a belief system creates a cantankerous neighbor or a militaristic extremist, then few people would want to embrace that individual’s belief system. As Origen argued in an earlier age, Christianity must be true because it creates the best people. Justin Martyr pointed out that Christians promoted peace in the empire and paid their taxes, didn’t commit adultery or kill or abandon their children. Humble apologetics is often an argument about ethics, with lots of examples.

Read it all.

“When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me. The moment I cross the threshold of a bank and attempt to transact business there, I become an irresponsible idiot.” — Stephen Leacock, “My Financial Career,” 1910

When they walk into a church, they get rattled. The members rattle them, the hymnals rattle them, the sight of the pews rattles them. Everything rattles them. The moment they cross the threshold of a church and attempt to worship there, they become irresponsible idiots.

Like the hero of Stephen Leacock’s “My Financial Career,” adults venturing into a place of worship for the first time in decades — perhaps ever — can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the experience. So much so, the United Church of Canada believes, that they simply stay away despite a growing desire to be part of a congregation again.

“Church is a bit of a mystery to most people these days,” says Daniel Benson, the United Church’s executive minister for resource production and distribution.

Read it all.

What kind of god would be plausible in this postmodern age? Taken by itself, that question represents the great divide between those who believe in the God of the Bible and those who see the need to reinvent a deity more acceptable to the modern mind.

After all, the answer to that question would reveal a great deal about the postmodern mind, and nothing about God himself. Unless, that is, you believe that God is merely a philosophical concept, and not the self-existent, self-defining God of the Bible.

That distinction is apparent in A Plausible God by Mitchell Silver, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The book’s subtitle is “Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology,” and Silver’s work is an attempt to construct a concept of God that modern secular people will find plausible. The book is directed to a Jewish readership, but the issues Silver raises and the arguments he proposes are precisely those found among many liberal Protestant theologians. Most, however, are less candid and clear-minded as Professor Silver.

Read it all.

Recently a friend assured me that a book by a well-known evangelical Christian was the new “Mere Christianity.” For an evangelical this possibly cryptic statement needs no explanation. As evangelicals, we are called to evangelize — to share the good news about Jesus Christ. Most of us also are surrounded by friends and co-workers who may be curious about our beliefs. And for over 55 years, Christians have turned to C.S. Lewis’s little book “Mere Christianity” for both of these reasons.

Of course, C.S. Lewis was an Irish-born Anglican and was committed to a mode of worship and a tradition far removed from those of American evangelicals. But he was also an adept Christian apologist who used his literary gifts — his fluent prose style, his powers of description, his engaging narrative voice, his way with metaphor — to explain the basic tenets of Christianity: what it meant to believe in Jesus Christ and to live according to Christian principles. More than that: He was at pains to capture, in prose, what it meant to discover Christianity as something worthy of belief. On the page, he thought his own faith through, trying to make sense of it for himself and others. There is always something ecumenical and instructive to Lewis’s religious writings, and “Mere Christianity” — which has sold several million copies since it was first published in 1952 after its original incarnation as a series of radio broadcasts — is the nonfiction book by which American Christians, not least American evangelicals, know Lewis best.

But much has changed in the last half-century.

Read it all

Now, I am going to speak to you about the eight big Challenges we face in the Advanced Model Global Era

This era has Challenges that can be put into 3 words:

Integrity – We need to realize that integrity is a rare commodity today. Personal integrity and the faithfulness of the faith lived out must mark our Christianity.

Credibility-today’s world contains immense intellectual challenges. We must learn to speak to the issues with the credible persuasion that is worthy of our Lord.

Civility – Everyone is now everywhere. How should we live with our differences? We must live out of love for Christ and speak the truth in love, which is our duty as Christians.

I am going to talk about 8 challenges that I see as the most important today.

Challenge 1: We must face up to the grand cultural challenges of our age.
Two important words for today are choice and change. They are the essence of our world. Not all of the choices and engagement are hype. The first thing people look for in most situations today is freedom of choice and the promise of change.

First, you have this huge shift from the industrial age to the information age. Globalization is the expansion of human relationships interconnected at a genuinely global level. An example is the spread of multi-capitalism: being able to buy or sell in a stock market regardless of the time of day. If our market is closed, we can buy and sell in Japan, et cetera. This abundance of choice most affects communication. The impact of globalization is akin to the invention of the wheel or the invention of writing. It has made a profound impact on identity, economic forces, and governments. The world is not just accelerating, but accelerating and living at speed of light. Faith is profoundly affected by this change.

A second factor in this is the arrogance of the West.

Read it all.

Just as the Christian church patronized the arts, so it vigorously supported scientific research. The caricature of an obscurantist, ignorance-promoting church simply doesn’t correspond to historical truth.

Some of history’s greatest scientists ”” Newton, Pasteur, Galilei, Lavoisier, Kepler, Copernicus, Faraday, Maxwell, Bernard and Heisenberg ”” were all Christians, and the list doesn’t stop there. Some important scientists, such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were actually Catholic priests!

Christianity is not against science, but against an absolutist reading of science. The empirical sciences cannot do everything, and hold no monopoly on knowledge and truth. Many important questions ”” the most important, really ”” fall outside the purview of science.

What is the meaning of life? How should people treat one another? What happens to us when we die?

No matter how long a white-coated scientist toils and sweats in his laboratory, his instruments will never reveal the answers to these questions. Science is the wrong tool for the job.

Read it all.

From that barest of sketches, it is obvious that the cosmological argument has some grave problems. For one thing, it takes for granted the dubious principle that everything has an explanation. For another, there is no reason to suppose that the self-existent entity it points to has any other divine attributes, like omniscience or benevolence. But grappling with its flawed logic has led to a deeper understanding of existence, causation, time and infinity.

Paulos misses most of that. Just when the going ought to get good, intellectually speaking, he bales out with a jokey allusion to self-fellating yogis. He has a similarly glib way with the other classic arguments for God’s existence. The ontological argument ”” which, in its most up-to-date version, involves a subtle analysis of how existence might be built into the very definition of being like a god ”” is “logical abracadabra.” The argument from design is a “creationist Ponzi scheme” that “quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.” You wonder how such transparently silly arguments could have engaged serious thinkers from Descartes, Leibniz and Hegel to the present day.

Clearly, Paulos is innocent of theology, which he dismisses as a “verbal magic show.” Like other neo-atheist authors, his tone tends to the sophomoric, with references to flatulent dogs and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ann Coulter crops up in the index, but one looks in vain for the name of a great religious thinker like Karl Barth, who saw theology as an effort to understand what faith has given, not a quest for logical proof.

Read it all.

In Book 10 of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Adam asks the question so many of his descendants have asked: why should the lives of billions be blighted because of a sin he, not they, committed? (“Ah, why should all mankind / For one man’s fault”¦ be condemned?”) He answers himself immediately: “But from me what can proceed, / But all corrupt, both Mind and Will depraved?” Adam’s Original Sin is like an inherited virus. Although those who are born with it are technically innocent of the crime ”“ they did not eat of the forbidden tree ”“ its effects rage in their blood and disorder their actions.

God, of course, could have restored them to spiritual health, but instead, Paul tells us in Romans, he “gave them over” to their “reprobate minds” and to the urging of their depraved wills. Because they are naturally “filled with all unrighteousness,” unrighteous deeds are what they will perform: “fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness . . . envy, murder . . . deceit, malignity.” “There is none righteous,” Paul declares, “no, not one.”

It follows, then (at least from these assumptions), that the presence of evil in the world cannot be traced back to God, who opened up the possibility of its emergence by granting his creatures free will but is not responsible for what they, in the person of their progenitor Adam, freely chose to do.

What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy ”“ the existence of suffering and evil in a world presided over by an all powerful and benevolent deity. The occurrence of catastrophes natural (hurricanes, droughts, disease) and unnatural (the Holocaust ) always revives the problem and provokes anguished discussion of it. The conviction, held by some, that the problem is intractable leads to the conclusion that there is no God, a conclusion reached gleefully by the authors of books like “The God Delusion,” “God Is Not Great” and “The End of Faith.”

Now two new books (to be published in the coming months) renew the debate. Their authors come from opposite directions ”“ one from theism to agnosticism, the other from atheism to theism ”“ but they meet, or rather cross paths, on the subject of suffering and evil.

Read it all.

Stephen Crittenden: Let’s talk about some of the specific arguments in The God Delusion, that you’ve been refuting. The key idea is Dawkins’ view that the natural sciences lead to atheism, that they make belief in God impossible. You say science leads not to atheism but to agnosticism.

Alister E. McGrath: That’s right. If it leads anywhere; and the point I try to make is actually the natural sciences can be interpreted in an atheist way and certainly Dawkins gives that perspective. But of course there are many, many scientists who are Christians, people like Owen Gingerich, who’s Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, or Francis Collins, who directs the Human Genome Project. And my real concern is that Dawkins seems to be wanting to say that if you’re a real scientist, you cannot be a religious believer for that reason. That there is this fundamental tension between science and faith. And I want to say that the history of the thing just doesn’t back him up on this point.

Stephen Crittenden: Indeed, is that one of the biggest weaknesses in Dawkins’ book, that he doesn’t acknowledge the role of the churches and religious believers in the history of science: the Jesuits in astronomy and seismology, and medicine, for instance; or the fact that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Belgian priest. And of course the general public doesn’t know all that much about this history either.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that’s right. I mean Dawkins has this very simplistic idea that science and religion have always been at war with each other, and he says only one can win, and let’s face it, it’s going to be science. But the history just doesn’t take into that place. The history suggests that at times there has been conflict, but at times there has been great synergy between science and religion and many would say that at this moment, there are some very exciting things happening in the dialogue between science and religion. What Dawkins is offering is a very simplistic, slick spin on a very complex phenomenon. It’s one that clearly he expects to appeal to his readers, but the reality is simply not like that at all.

Read it all.

Recently, Dawkins published The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19). As McGrath says, this book marks a significant departure. Dawkins is no longer an atheist whose main aim is to make evolutionary biology accessible to the general public: he is now a preacher whose mission is to convert religious readers to atheism. The book has a strident and aggressive tone, and a cavalier attitude to evidence that tells against its thesis that religion is the root of all evil. This has provoked McGrath to write a short volume exposing its flaws. The Dawkins Delusion? is credited to both Alister McGrath and his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, who is a lecturer in psychology of religion at Heythrop College, London. But the extent of her contribution is not made clear, and the book is written in the first person singular “for historical and stylistic reasons”. This makes it difficult to interpret the autobiographical statements. In this review I shall follow the authors’ convention and refer to “McGrath” in the masculine singular.

McGrath says that he is completely baffled by the hostility that Dawkins now displays to religion. But surely two recent phenomena explain the heightened shrillness of Dawkins’s atheism. The first is the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, which endangers the teaching of evolutionary science in schools. The second is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism which has spawned extremist groups of people willing to murder thousands of innocent people even at the cost of their own lives. Of course McGrath is no less horrified than Dawkins by these two developments. But he regards them as largely irrelevant to the evaluation of religion. There can be atheist fundamentalists as well as religious ones, and Dawkins, he claims, shows every sign of being one. Moreover, atheism as well as religion has given rise to massacres, and true religion, as exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth, is hostile to violence.

These points are fairly taken, but I do not think McGrath does justice to the way in which religion, if it does not originate evil, gives it greater power.

Read it all.

There is a strange triangle of forces between God, Richard Dawkins and his opponents. It is an unsymmetrical triangle, in that, although his opponents seem to hate Professor Dawkins and Professor Dawkins certainly hates God, God does not hate Professor Dawkins. That seems to stir the professor to ever greater efforts.

On Earth, Alister McGrath’s book The Dawkins Delusion has been riding high since February in the Amazon internet ranking, though not nearly as high as Professor Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Now a small but cheerful volume called Darwin’s Angel (Profile Books, £9.99) has been published, demolishing The God Delusion. It is by John Cornwell, who runs the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge….

Read it all.

At first glance, the expression “the dictatorship of relativism” sounds like a paradox, maybe even an oxymoron. After all, aren’t dictatorships a form of absolutism? And don’t relativists find it difficult, if not impossible, to make judgments about differing moral systems? So how can they “dictate” the behavior and thoughts of others if they can’t make judgments about what people should think and do?

Take the case of the adoption-agency controversy in Great Britain. Last spring, Parliament passed a law requiring Catholic adoption agencies to allow gay couples to adopt children who had been placed under the care of these agencies. Now a true relativist would treat Catholics like exotic Amazonians: Sure, they have this odd view of the family, whereby only a married husband and wife are the legitimate and appropriate couple suited for raising a child, natural or adopted. How weird, but who are we to judge?

Secularists, of course, disagree, and see no problem with “Heather having two mommies.” But what does that have to do with Catholics? After all, anthropologists recognize that different societies are marked by different kinship-relations: They freely, and nonjudgmentally, discuss matriarchal societies in prehistory, polygamy in seventh-century Arabia and nineteenth-century Utah, gay “marriage” in Massachusetts and Holland, and so on, all without judgmentalism or moralism. So why not let Catholics live their odd lifestyle too?

But that’s not happening, and the question is why. Hypocrisy surely has something to do with it. I suspect, though, that the root cause comes from the odd admixture of absolutism and relativism in self-professed relativists….

Read it all.

Rowan Williams’s Tokens of Trust is the most straightforward as well as the most persuasive of the three, although, or perhaps because, it is also the most evidently addressed in the first place to a Christian audience. Talks the Archbishop of Canterbury gave in his cathedral in Holy Week 2005 have become a short, attractive book on the basics ”“ impossible now to use the word “fundamentals” ”“ of Christian belief as expressed in the statements of the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds, printed at the beginning of the book. This is no easier a project now, though no more difficult either, than it was for Ratzinger in 1968. Dr Williams, careful neither to put off the beginner with a forbidding demandingness nor to blunt the definitiveness of Christianity’s description of the plight of the human race and the salvation it is offered, achieves a remarkable degree of success. He begins, in our world pervaded by mistrust because pervaded by the competitiveness of different versions of the will to power, with the possibility of trust. “I trust in God” is both easier and harder to say than “I believe in God”: easier because it requires less of an intellectual effort, harder because trusting in God cannot make sense unless there is God to trust. Paul’s resounding, complex statement of the core of Trinitarian faith at the opening of Ephesians is given at the outset as the affirmation without which there can be nothing truly recognizable as Christian belief. In its light, false notions of God should begin to fade into the shadows ”“ and here, for the first but not the last time, Williams suggests that we may see in human lives lived in this light (“the communion of saints”, in the phrase from the Apostles’ Creed) some “faint reflection” of what God is “like”.

What follows, lucid, warm, never intimidating ”“ a sea, as was long ago said of Christianity itself, shallow enough for children to paddle in, deep enough for the wise to swim in ”“ could not have been written without, behind it, decades of theological and philosophical study. Great thinkers of the past are about in the depths; none is mentioned by name but their enriching presence is often detectable. Williams’s account of creation, that is of God as creator and sustainer of being, is, for example, Thomist and profoundly orthodox, but free of Aristotelian terminology, easy to understand on a number of levels, and a sound basis for his dismissal of “the pointless stand-off between religion and science”. That “our present ecological crisis” has “a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world in relation to the mystery of God” is in this properly established context incontrovertible.

Read it all.

We have a problem of theology in our time and culture. I am not talking about the headline issues of human sexuality. I am talking about God.

It is fascinating that recent best-seller lists of books contain titles such as The God Delusion and God Is Not Great. I read another book recently of the same mindset titled Letter to a Christian Nation that argued that God is a hoax and religion is a detriment to healthy society.

Interestingly, I discovered that I agreed with many statements that the author made because religion in general, and Christianity specifically, can be used to launch fear, mistrust and destruction. Clearly, though, the God I worship is real and does not operate from fear and violence.

I noticed several things in reading this book. One is that the author valued something that Anglicans also deeply value: human reason. Our faith tradition encourages questions and the seeking of truth so as to deepen faith. We do not see faith as an attribute that avoids the intellect.

Read it all.

The Get Religion post by Terry Mattingly immediately below this entry asserts that many journalists, religious leaders and others too quickly try to dismiss the differences between various faiths and claim all religions are alike. Obviously readers who follow this blog are aware of the story of the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding who claims she can be both an Episcopal priest and a Muslim. We’ve seen the desire to try and minimize the differences between religions firsthand recently.

However, rather than just wring our hands in despair at this tendency, let’s compile some resources we can use to strengthen our skills in apologetics. What resources are out there: books, websites, etc. that you have found helpful in inter-faith dialogue and witnessing to those of different faiths, or, in answering those who wonder whether there really any differences among religions?

Enquiring Elves want to know…!

For instance, if you had the chance to sit down one-on-one with Ann Holmes Redding, what might you say to her? Or what will you say (or have you said) to friends who ask you about this story during coffee hour at church? With a growing trend towards multiculturalism and pluralism, this elf is convinced we need to be better equipped to share the distinctive truths of Christianity and answer specific objections and questions raised by adherents of other faiths as to how on earth we could be so “judgmental” and “exclusive” to believe that Christianity makes absolute truth claims.

Over at Get Religion, Terry Mattingly reviews a recent article by Newsweek and examines the tendency among some journalists as well as some liberal religious leaders to believe “all religions are alike:”

I was flipping through my copy of Newsweek the other day and came across a headline that almost made me swoon. To make matters more interesting for people who care about religion news, this little article was part of the magazine’s giant “What You Need To Know Now” spread.

The headline said: “True or False: The Major Religions Are Essentially Alike.”

According to author Stephen Prothero of Boston University, the correct answer is “false.” Prothero is, of course, the author of the new book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know ”” And Doesn’t.

Here is now the Newsweek article opens:

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful ”” and all are true. The proof text for this happy affirmation comes, appropriately enough, from the Hindu Vedas rather than the Christian Bible: “Truth is one, the sages call it by many names.”

According to this multicultural form of wisdom, the world’s religions are merely different paths up the same mountain. But are they?

Anyone willing to deal with facts and doctrines, rather than emotions and fog, has to come to the conclusion that the various world religions clash over and over again, creating eternal divides that are real and can only be covered up by living in a state of denial, according to Prothero.

Yet that is precisely where many people ”” including scores of journalists ”” like to live.

Here’s the full Get Religion entry.