On the Wednesday after Easter, nine hundred Notre Dame students serenely walked into the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center to see a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. “Is Religion the Problem?” was the question. About two hours later, they serenely walked out, their faith intact. No dorm rector lost sleep dealing with the death of God that night. Why n (...)
Columnists
A Darkening
WHY A CHURCH SCANDAL DOES MORE HARM THAN THE NEW ATHEISM
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Outstanding. Prof. Kaveny is spot on, dead right, and any other applicable cliche. She gets it.
Well, yes. We had a similar event at Fairfield University last month, with Hitchens pitted against John Haught. The debate was inconclusive, the audience unimpressed by the atheist unless they arrived as one of his fans. But it's the old story, the great atheists from Feuerbach on challenge religious believers from the outside. Real challenges come from within the religious believer's own experience, whether the ecclesial pain of sex abuse and episcopal incompetence or the plain old problem of evil. Job wasn't phased by the pathetic arguments of his "friends" but by the disjunction between what he thought God was and how it was working out in his life.