Mr. Cox: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Is that, it’s ”” you can be very highly educated and also be very strident and also close out of your discourse important issues, which are current and new forms of thinking, and really not be in touch with the current state of the dialogue. That’s what bothers me about them. They really don’t seem to be interested or don’t have the time or the discipline to engage or to tune in to this really quite remarkable, new series of conversations that’s going on.
We have one going on here now about evolution that involves most people at Harvard. And my colleague, Sarah Coakley is heading a project here on theology and evolution, drawing in, oh, physicists, cosmologists, theologians of, professors of religion. It’s cutting edge and no evidence of that is in either of those books.
Ms. Tippett: So I know that when your book came out, The Secular City, in 1965, I think you’ve written that the incredible sales surprised you, surprise your publisher. And I think the sales of Christopher Hitchens’s books and Richard Dawkins’s have also, and these others, Sam Harris, you know, Daniel Dennett, have surprised many people. Do you think that they are tapping into something similar to what you tapped into in 1965? And what is that?
Mr. Cox: Secular City came about in the middle of the ’60s, when everybody was open to a lot of new and interesting things, religion ”” Second Vatican Council was happening, you know?
Ms. Tippett: Right.
Mr. Cox: It just finished. And then there was the religious opposition to the war in Vietnam. Religion, in a way, then different from the way it is now, was very much on people’s minds. And remember, there were millions and millions of Catholics, at that time, who had just lived through the Second Vatican Council that was ”” it ended in ’65”¦
Ms. Tippett: Yeah.
Mr. Cox: ”¦when Secular City came out, who were encouraged by their own church, you know, to think more broadly and more deeply, more ecumenically. And they had John XXIII who was a, really kind of opening the windows of the Church. And so I think that I was lucky that Secular City hit at just the moment when people were looking around for things. And it picked up on that audience.
Ms. Tippett: And so do you think that it’s the same dynamic now that ”” and clearly religion has been out so much more on the surface in the 21st century, I mean, since 9/11 and before and beyond?