Becky Garrison recently e-mailed Tina Beattie, author of The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion, to glean her insights on this ongoing debate.

Why is this new atheism primarily a British and American phenomenon?

Although the new atheists are sweeping in their condemnation of religion per se, they are by and large a rather homogenous bunch of disaffected white, male, English-speaking Protestants who seek in evolutionary science the kind of reassurances that perhaps they might once have sought in Christianity.

Sam Harris is Jewish.

Sam Harris is an exception. Not only does he come from a Jewish background, he is also a much more complex and clever philosopher with a smattering of mysticism and a neo-con approach to politics, which allows him to offer a quite terrifying philosophical justification for torture, war, and the inevitability of "collateral damage." Harris apart, most of the new atheists have much in common with their Christian fundamentalist counterparts.

How so?

They think that theirs is the one and only truth to which all other cultures and religions should submit; they interpret the Bible literally (they blindly condemn what religious fundamentalists blindly support); and they have very little insight into the psychological, philosophical, and historical complexities of their fellow human beings outside their own small circle. (Dawkins refers to French critical theorists as 'icons of haute francophonyism.') The new atheism reflects a certain intellectual zeitgeist currently fashionable in Britain and America (which are of course also two quite different cultures), rather than those of European cultures, which have been more deeply influenced by Catholic and Jewish thinkers, and where there is a greater concern for language and symbolism than science and fact in the construction of meaning. Continental atheism has its roots in philosophy and psychoanalysis rather than the material sciences (e.g. Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan), but it also arises out of the trauma of the 20th century and the Holocaust. I think it's fair to say that many Christian thinkers -- myself included -- have little difficulty reconciling Darwin's theory of natural selection with a Christian understanding of the world, but Auschwitz poses a much more fundamental challenge to the history and values of our faith. I would add that the new atheists fail to take seriously enough the challenge posed by the genocides of the 20th century to their own position, with its faith in science, progress, and reason. We should remember that, in the 20th century, a religious person was much more likely to be persecuted by an atheist than vice versa.

Why do you think you have more in common with Richard Dawkins than George W. Bush?

Well, for a start Dawkins has been fairly robust in his condemnation of the Iraq war, but I also agree with many of his criticisms about the dangers of religion -- not the least of those dangers is the alliance between recent American presidents and the Christian Right. (I have a friend who has a bumper sticker that says 'The Christian Right is neither'). My problem with Dawkins is not that he criticizes religious extremism, but that he is so undiscriminating and ill-informed in his criticisms. He blunts the impact of his own critique by spreading it too thinly and too wide. But if I had to choose between spending an evening with Dawkins or with Dubya, I'd choose Dawkins if only because I think the jokes would be better (the intentional ones, anyway).

[to be continued ...]

 

Becky Garrison is the author of The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail.

This summer, two friends and I are doing something that seems a bit outlandish (especially for 40-year-old guys). We've borrowed a friend's RV, and we're touring the country to talk about our books. Doug Pagitt (A Christianity Worth Believing), Mark Scandrette (Soul Graffiti), and I (The New Christians) are in the midst of a 32-city tour that we've dubbed, "The Church Basement Roadshow: A Rollin' Gospel Revival." We've completed our West Coast leg, and now we're about to roll down the center of the country (click here for dates)

What's a bit more outlandish is that we wanted to make this unlike any other book tour, so we conceived of and wrote a 90-minute show to highlight the core message in each of our books. And in that show, we each play our fictional great-grandfathers, two-bit revivalists from 1908.

Honestly, we stumbled on 1908 because it's 100 years ago, but then we started doing research and discovered what an incredible year it really was. (On the RV we've been reading the book, America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation by Jim Rasenberger.) At the dawn of 1908 almost no one had heard of the Wright Brothers; by the end of the year they were household names. The race to the North Pole was on, and an automobile race from New York City to Paris (via the Bering Straight!) had captured the American imagination.

But while most Americans were extremely optimistic about the technological advances of the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane; all was not well. That winter, President Teddy Roosevelt (whom many in the country consider deranged for his fluctuations of temper) sent the U.S. Navy's Great White Fleet around the world, most probably to intimidate Japan. And that spring, New York and Chicago experienced frequent terrorist bombings by anarchist groups.

Over two million children worked in factories and mines. And sixty percent of the wealth in America was controlled by a hyper-wealthy two percent of the population (think Carnegie, Morgan, et al).

Things have changed in America in the last century, to be sure, but I keep thinking about a summer 100 years ago when our nation was sending Olympic atheletes overseas (to London) and preparing for a presidential election between a Republican insider (Secretary of War William Howard Taft) and a midwestern Democrat known for his scintillating oratory (William Jennings Bryan).

And the more I think about it, the more kinship I feel with my great-grandfather (the non-fiction one).

Tony Jones is the national coordinator of Emergent Village.

Some fun for your Friday: Mark Pinsky, author of The Gospel According to the Simpsons, has reviewed the newly released Flanders' Book of Faith, by series creator Matt Groening:

It's a slim, illustrated book, less than a hundred pages, and it presents the title character with the same mixture of affection and mockery with which Ned has been portrayed in the series for nearly two decades. What is interesting, however, is that the credited author is Matt Groening, the series creator, and the publisher is HarperCollins, a division of Fox. Together, this puts an imprimatur on the basically favorable view of believers that The Simpsons' irreverent writers have been running away from for years. That is, Ned Flanders is an exemplar of good-natured and (literally) muscular Christianity.

You can check out Pinsky's full review at Christianity Today or another longer version in today's Wall Street Journal, including this nugget:

The "Simpsons" writers have managed to navigate the tricky space between animation and caricature in portraying Ned's Christian faith. He has a dual, almost contradictory appeal. College-age evangelicals see many of their own well-intentioned foibles in him. And some secular viewers outside the Sun Belt suburbs and the heartland -- who may have yet to meet an evangelical in the flesh and may even be hostile to the rise of religious conservatives -- find him to be an accessible and even sympathetic exemplar of American evangelicalism.

But telling you that was just an excuse to plug an article I did for Sojourners magazine waaaay back in 2001, titled "Don't Have a Sacred Cow, Man," in which I compare and contrast Ned Flanders and Rev. Lovejoy as representatives of incarnational vs. institutionalized Christianity. (Update to my tagline at the end of that article: My complete Simpsons archive is still up to date, but I've made the switch from VHS to digital. And though he's gotten a little grayer, my dad still kind of looks like Ned.)

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners.

In church one day, my pastor asked us to raise our hands if we believed in what the Bible said. The right answer seemed pretty obvious, and the whole congregation and I raised our hands. Then he asked us to raise our hand if we had read the Bible in its entirety. Touché, Pastor Sean. Touché.

In his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A.J. Jacobs lives as a biblical fundamentalist so you don't have to. Jacobs describes himself as "Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant" and seeks advice from rabbis, pastors, church members, historians, and textbooks on his quest to live the "ultimate Biblical life." The book chronicles his attempt to conform to the myriad rules found in the Bible (Don't wear mixed fibers! Be fruitful and multiply! Stone adulterers! Forgive!), and the results are often pretty funny. Yes, Jacobs sets out to lampoon Biblical fundamentalists, but by the end of his experiment he finds himself changed - he reveres life more, he is a better father, and he has more respect for people of faith. I picked up this book for laughs, but was surprised when I ended up quite touched by it. A.J. Jacobs writes with the tone of a friend, and when I finished the book I felt I had found a fellow believer (he now calls himself a "reverent agnostic") walking by my side.

By day 264, you warm up to Christian literalists as embodied by Dr. Tony Campolo and the Red Letter Christians. How did your year-long experiment affect your perception of Christian "fundamentalists", especially in contrast to how they are portrayed in mainstream media?

It changed it drastically. Like many Americans, I used to have an embarrassingly simplistic view of evangelical Christianity. I thought it was this monolithic movement where everyone walked in lock step with Pat Robertson. I figured almost all evangelical Christians were focused on the issues of homosexuality and abortion. I hadn't heard of the Red Letter Christians and their focus on poverty and the environment. I missed the complexity of evangelical Christianity, as does much of the media. It's sort of the equivalent of saying, 'Oh, James Taylor and Kid Rock are both rock musicians, so they're pretty much the same.'

You call your book a "(gentle) attack" on fundamentalism, as you set out to show how absurd and impossible it is to live a literally Biblical lifestyle without dropping out of general society. Is there anything that especially surprised or delighted you about following the rules? How about anything that really scared you?

So much surprised and delighted me. I fell in love with the Sabbath. I enjoyed the ban on gossiping (not that I was totally successful; I live in New York and I work in the media, so gossip is about as omnipresent as air). And here's an odd one: I liked following the second commandment literally: No making images. I took this to the limit. No turning on the TV, no watching DVDs, no photos, no doodles. And it turned out to be really helpful. I think our culture is too much in love with images. Everything is image-driven, and we're forgetting how to read. And there's something sacred about reading.

What scared me? I guess how easy it is to become self-righteous. I had to fight it every day.

On day 14, you crib a line from "Chariots of Fire" about feeling God's pleasure as you tithe to charities. Have you managed to maintain any of the Biblical practices from your experiment so that you can continue feeling "the warm ember that starts at the back of [your] neck?"

I do still try to do good works. I don't do as much as I should. And I don't tithe as strictly as I should - I'm down from 10 percent to maybe seven or eight percent. But I try. Because my Bible year taught me something that I wish I had known for the first 38 years of my life.

If you want to be happy, you should pursue OTHER people's happiness. You should do good things for others. It's a paradox, but it works. Being unselfish leads to selfish fulfillment.

Who would OT God vote for? Who would NT Jesus endorse?

Wasn't it a wise man named Jim Wallis who said that God was not a Republican or Democrat?

I do remember that part of the Old Testament where God is choosing whom to anoint as the next king of Israel. And a man named Jesse parades all his sons before the prophet Samuel. And Samuel sees the tallest son, Eliab and figured he will be the new leader.

"But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."

Which is good news for Dennis Kucinich. Too bad he dropped out.

But it does remind us: Look beyond the superficial.

You've given a lot of interviews for this book, most of which are on the web somewhere. Tell me something about you that I can't google.

I'll tell you all the answers to my four-year-old son's favorite questions. My favorite color is green. My favorite animal is a zebra. My favorite candy is caramel. And my favorite Dora character is probably Boots the Monkey. You won't find that on the Internet!

 

Anna Almendrala is the marketing and circulation assistant for Sojourners. For more information on the book, click here.

A few of us around Sojourners have been reading award-winning Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat since she published her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Ten years later we were thrilled when she sent us a lovely vignette, Indigo Girl, which wepublished in December 2004. It might be the only short story Sojourners has ever published.

When we heard that her newest book, Brother I'm Dying, dealt with the death of Danticat's 81-year-old uncle, the Reverend Joseph Dantica, who died in the custody of U.S. immigration officials while seeking political asylum, we knew we wanted her to tell Sojourners that story—and what it says about the deadly debacle that is our immigration policy today.

In March, Brother I'm Dying won the National Book Critics Circle award for best autobiography. "I only hope my dad and uncle are proud," Edwidge told me. "The book, I feel, was written with them and for them so the award too is for them."

From her home in Miami, Danticat graciously responded to our interview questions:

BERGER: As an artist you are able to witness against injustice through the crafting of story and word as you have done in Brother, I'm Dying. Does the book vindicate the indignity and death your uncle suffered? How has the experience of writing the book changed you spiritually?

DANTICAT: People sometimes think, or say, that you should have closure now, Edwidge. You've written this book. Writing the book was part of a spiritual process which does not end with the book being published though. I was changed a great deal by this process, of course. I lost two very important people to me, my father and my uncle. They both suffered so much at the end, in part so we—my family here—can thrive. The gift I ended up with at the end was my daughter, who was born as these men were dying. I wouldn't say that the book vindicates the death or deaths completely. It's certainly the only vindication we've had, so I am glad I wrote it.

Read the whole interview ("Death By Asylum," Sojourners April 2008) here.

Rose Marie Berger is an associate editor at Sojourners.

When I interviewed Phyllis Tickle for Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church, she reflected on the seismic changes she sees occurring in contemporary Christianity. "Evangelicalism has lost much of its credibility and much of its spiritual energy as of late, in much the same way that mainline Protestantism has." Lest anyone find this news so depressing they want to run for cover, Phyllis offers some much needed historical and hopeful perspective. "About every 500 years, the church feels compelled to have a giant rummage sale." During the last such upheaval, the Great Reformation of 500 years ago, Protestantism took over hegemony. But Roman Catholicism did not die. It just had to drop back and reconfigure. Each time a rummage sale has happened, in other words, whatever held pride of place simply gets broken apart into smaller pieces, and then it picks itself up and to use Diana Butler Bass's term, "re-tradition.

As I ride along the religious superhighway, I find I need some new tools to help me navigate this process. For starters, Andrew Jones' blog provides excellent ongoing reflections of the changing Christian landscape from a global perspective, as Proost UK offers worship resources that help refuel me and recharge my batteries. Recently, I caught wind of Tickle's radical yet totally orthodox retelling of the gospel. In The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections Tickle categorizes the sayings of Jesus into five categories: Public Teachings, Private Instructions, Healing Dialogues, Intimate Conversations, and the Post-Resurrection Encounters.

"Psychologists have demonstrated many times over that what we say is tailored to and informed by the audience to whom we say it. In a sense, in other words, while each of us may be an integer, we have various configurations or arrangements of our "self" that we modify, exchange, and employ according to our perception of those whom we are at any given moment engaging. Jesus of Nazareth, being fully human, followed that same pattern, though once again I had never perceived or even entertained such a possibility until I began listening to Him shift emphases, adapt rhetoric, and fashion varying modes of analogy to fit those with whom He was speaking."

Thanks to Lacey's latest and, unfortunately, last book, The Liberator (a revolutionary retelling of the New Testament), the Inspired by the Bible Experience: New Testament audio CD (nothing says "Oh my God" like Samuel L. Jackson channeling the voice of the Almighty), and Tickle's commentary, I've been immersed in scripture from some rather unique vantage points. Over the past year, instead of trying to memorize scripture and verse, I'm allowing these sweet holy words to fall on my ears and into my mouth. It's like I'm falling in love all over again with this radical love-making, rule-breaking, life-taking Christ.

Becky Garrison is senior contributing writer for The Wittenburg Door. Portions of this posting are excerpted from The New Atheists Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail.  Reprinted with permission from Thomas Nelson, Inc.

SojoFriend Amy Sullivan is popping up everywhere in the news with her new book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap. (It's excellent! See an excerpt in the March issue of Sojourners magazine) We remember back in 2001 when Amy wrote her first review in Sojourners on Stephen Carter's book God's Name in Vain.

Amy has worked tremendously hard these last several years. She was an editor at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (with Washington Post columnist and SojoFriend E.J. Dionne Jr. See the recent Sojourners excerpt from E.J.'s new book Souled Out.) and at the Washington Monthly. She ran a great blog for awhile on "(Almost) Daily Thoughts on Political Happenings" and somewhere in there she slid in a Ph.D. at Princeton in Religion and Politics.

For the woman who dreamed of being a pundit, we think she's achieved star status with her most recent job as Nation editor at Time magazine. For more on SojoFriend Amy Sullivan, see Salon's recent interview with her. Go Amy!

Rose Marie Berger is an assistant editor for Sojourners.

It's true: the religious radio/TV waves are still pretty crowded with 24/7 programming that proclaims a less-than-integral understanding of the Christian gospel and its social implications. But on the bookshelves, thankfully, it's a different story.

Another recent treasure is E.J. Dionne's Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right. I recently participated in an online discussion of the book at TPMCafe ... you can read part one and part two of my contributions - as well as posts by E.J., Alexia Kelley, and others. The comments are enlightening (and occasionally a little disturbing) as well.

Good books like this one and other recent releases announced on this blog ... along with associated online discussions and interactive regional gatherings - not to mention the important one-to-one conversations they stimulate at dinner tables, coffee shops, and water coolers - are waking up more and more of us churchly folk to the deeper and broader implications of the Christian gospel. Jim may be right: we may indeed soon have a great awakening on our hands, inspiring followers of Christ to "works of faith and labors of love and endurance in hope" (I Thessalonians 1:3) - all for the common good.

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is board chair for Sojourners. Click here to see some of his video blogs, and learn about his Everything Must Change tour at deepshift.org.

Far too often, activists do little to nurture their souls. Consequently, they "burn out." Ignoring the need for spiritual revitalization to sustain their zeal on behalf of the poor and oppressed, they wear out and fade into oblivion. Often those who were one-time dynamic spokespersons for social justice while living out countercultural values become exhausted from working hard with very little sense of accomplishment. Becoming cynical, they sometimes say disparaging things about those who still remain in the fray.

It was out of deep concern for the spiritual condition of social justice activists that I teamed up with a young professor from Spring Arbor University, Mary Darling, to write The God of Intimacy and Action: Reconnecting Ancient Spiritual Practices, Evangelism and Justice.

In this book I, along with my co-author, endeavor to present ways to renew the energies of social activists by tapping into spiritual practices of Catholic mystics that we Protestants often ignore. In particular, we focus much of our attention on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius whose directives can help us move beyond the often shallow and mundane prayer styles that are common among Protestants.

First, we explore what Ignatian spiritual directors call centering prayer. Centering prayer is something I do each morning for at least 15 minutes. During the early hours, I take time to center down on Jesus as I say his name over and over again. I do this until everything else is driven out of my mind and I am almost totally focused on Jesus. In stillness I wait for Jesus to reach out from the cross and absorb into his own body the sins that mark my soul. Then, in the midst of quietude, I wait for the Holy Spirit to flow into me and saturate my personhood. I have learned from experience that "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength" (Isaiah 40:31).

Secondly, I practice Lectio Divina. This is a spiritually informed way of reading scripture in which there is no reliance on scholarly interpretations, such as Bible commentaries. I read some carefully chosen verses, shut the Bible, close my eyes, and wait patiently for the Holy Spirit to tell me what I need to hear from God through what I have just read. There is something mystical in recognizing how verses that I have read many times before speak to me in new ways when practicing Lectio Divina, bringing new meaning that is especially relevant to my existential situation.

Next, there is a practice called "The Prayer of Examen." This I do at bedtime. With my head on my pillow, I reflect on all the ways God used me to do good during the past day. I think of all the things I did that were "honest … just … pure … lovely … of good report … and worthy of praise" (see Philippians 4:8). Only after such "feel-good" self-affirmations am I ready to review the day for a second time--this time remembering the ways in which I sinned and fell short of what I should have been and done. I confess and wait for Christ's cleansing.

Of course, there is much more to the spiritual exercises that have proved so essential in keeping me alive spiritually and revitalizing my "first love" for working for justice and doing evangelism. In the book Mary and I go into these exercises in depth and attempt to show how biblically prescribed and spiritually valid mysticism has motivated leaders such as John Wesley and George Whitefield to proclaim a holistic gospel.

I hope you get this book and find it useful in making spiritual renewal a daily practice. Developing spiritual depth through such exercises will enable you, in accord with the teachings of Jesus, to bring forth fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold (Matthew 13:8). Without such care of the soul you are apt, as the scriptures tell us, to "wither away" (Matthew 13:6).

Tony Campolo is founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University.

In two weeks, you will have your first chance to read Jim Wallis' latest book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. You'll soon hear about the upcoming book tour, a new website featuring the book and a slate of other activities planned around the launch.

I had the chance to read the manuscript a few months ago, and I feel real excitement about what this book can mean to our personal lives as sojourners, to our faith communities seeking justice and peace, and to our nation and world that stand at a real crossroads.

Three years ago, when God's Politics first came out, it took everyone by surprise. God's Politics struck a nerve – it diagnosed a nation that was polarized and a faith that had been hijacked. No one expected it to make the bestsellers lists. But because so many of us read the book with enthusiasm and encouraged others to do so, a new national conversation about faith and politics opened up. Sojourners' message and visibility reached a new level as many of us said, "At last someone is speaking up for the kind of faith I actually believe in. At last there's a Christian leader articulating a message that isn't an embarrassment to me." God's Politics proclaimed a faith that can and should change the big things – like poverty and war. As Jim was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The O'Reilly Factor, Meet the Press, CNN, NPR, and other high-profile places, we saw a new kind of Christianity become part of the national dialogue. As Jim often says, the monologue of a polarizing, combative, and narrow version of Christian faith was over, and a new dialogue had begun.

Now it's time for the next chapter. When The Great Awakening arrives in bookstores on Jan. 22, the conversation will get more practical as Jim explains how we can turn this new dialogue into action. Thousands of us will be reading stories of how spiritually-driven movements have led the charge for change in the past and why we're on the cusp of another such awakening right now. It's a book meant to equip everyday Christians with ways to talk about our deepest values and highest hopes for a better world, and then to translate our values and hopes into action.

We'll need your help, again. Our hope is that like God's Politics, this book will inspire another wave of commitment, and the tide of justice will continue to rise. We'll soon be inviting you to check out the book and to tell others about it, too. As an author and an avid reader, I have a feeling for how important a book release can be. On behalf of the whole Sojourners board and staff, I want to thank you for your support, prayers, and involvement around the release of The Great Awakening.

I would love to live as a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

The Irish writer, priest, and environmental activist, and my beloved friend - John O'Donohue - died unexpectedly and peacefully in the early hours of Friday, Jan. 4, 2008. His witness to peace, his work on the human heart, and his actions for justice make him someone that I want to introduce to readers of this blog who may not already know him.

John's work on retrieving the earthiness of celtic spirituality and helping make sense of it in a postmodern world is so profound that its impact has not yet been fully felt, and it represents something rare in a consumerist culture: a work of art that will outlast its author. He knew that work for justice and peace in the world depends on the inner work we must do to allow our own souls not to become corroded by whatever wounds we have sustained on our journeys.

What many may not know is that in addition to his ministry in the Catholic priesthood, and latterly as a writer and speaker, he was a serious environmental activist, helping to spearhead a small group that successfully prevented the despoilment of the Burren, one of Ireland's most stunning natural landscapes. He put his reputation on the line to save something worth preserving, even being prepared to go to prison to do so; and through building community consensus and taking on the powers that be, won an astonishing David and Goliath victory that resulted in substantial change to Irish law and politics.

John knew that we live in the intersection of the sacred and the profane, and he wanted to nudge us in the direction of understanding that holiness has more to do with being aware of the light around us, and living lives that honour it, than moral puritanism. In the introduction to his book To Bless the Space Between Us, to be published in March, he writes of how, in any given day, some of us humans will experience the shock of being told of the sudden death of a friend. John wanted us to be tender to the fact that the faces of strangers we meet every day all hide secrets that are both divine and tragic. We do not always know who among us is suffering some unnameable torment, nor who is rejoicing at the blessing of a lifetime.

In his activism, as well as his writing and speaking, and most of all, in his life, he wanted people to have shelter from the storms their lives would bring. To those of us privileged to know him, he showed love and friendship of a rare sort; he was the kind of spiritual teacher who revealed mysteries that most of us can't see; he truly lived a life to the full. And at the beginning of this year, which brings the 40th anniversary of the deaths of three other men who sought to embody an extraordinary kind of leadership – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Father Thomas Merton – most of all what I want to remember about John O'Donohue is that he taught me that the best corrective to evil is not just to kick against it, but to make something beautiful in its place.

John O'Donohue's books Anam Cara, Eternal Echoes, and Beauty are all available; his latest and final book, To Bless the Space Between Us, will be published in March.

Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com

Back in 2004, Anthony Flew, the world’s most prominent atheist, stated he believed in God. Since this pronouncement, some of his fellow atheists treat him as though he's gone over to the dark side and literally lost his mind. In a nutshell, they feel this champion of their cause has flown the coop, as it were, and is being used as a pawn by those Christians who need someone of Flew’s stature to give weight to the entire Intelligent Design movement. (See The New York Times article, "The Turning of an Atheist").

Nadda, nope, no way. Not so fast.

Let's reflect on what Flew actually said when he came out as a theist. He told The Associated Press that "his current ideas have some similarity with American ‘intelligent design’ theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life."

As Christine Rosen wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Flew is not quite the crusading convert his book title suggests: He did not embrace Christianity, but Deism. As he told Christianity Today, he feels more spiritual kinship with the skeptical Thomas Jefferson than with Jesus. 'I understand why Christians are excited, but if they think I am going to become a convert to Christ in the near future, they are very much mistaken,' he said."

Pick up a copy of Flew’s latest book, There is A God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, and you’ll see that a thinker of his stature can’t be painted in simple monochromatic colors. Rather, this biography, co-written by Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese, reveals that Flew’s lifelong mantra was to follow the policy of Plato's Socrates: "We must follow the argument wherever it leads." After this preacher’s son penned his infamous short paper,"Theology and Falsification" in 1950, he assumed the position as the leading atheist apologist. Later in life, the evidence led him to conclude that the complexity of nature and the origin of life can only be explained by the presence of a super-intelligence.

While we’re at it, let’s not pull out the ageism card willy-nilly. If the critics are correct that Flew has truly gone "off his rocker," I doubt a publisher of HarperOne’s stature would have tackled this project. I’m not about to defend any publisher’s entire catalogue but if you skim their offerings, you’ll see that except for a few bits of New Thought nonsense, they tend to produce serious scholarship, not shoddy schlock. Furthermore, as I interviewed N.T. Wright for The Wittenburg Door and spent some time with him at Soularize 2007, I can attest that he would not have contributed to this dialogue if he wasn't convinced this was a worthy endeavor.

The flurry over Flew raises this question for me. Why do we feel the need to put the other in a prescribed belief box instead of allowing space to differ and dialogue?

Becky Garrison is the author of The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: Their Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith (Thomas Nelson, January 2008).

Before coming to Sojourners to serve as the congregational coordinator, I had the unique opportunity to teach Protestant faith formation classes at Leavenworth federal prison in Kansas. Leavenworth was experimenting with a program called Life Connections that allowed Muslims, Christians, and adherents of a variety of faith traditions the opportunity to live together in community and participate in spiritual formation. Participants had the opportunity to deepen their own faith and, at the same time, build trust and friendships with people from other faiths.

I will never forget arriving at the "Big House" for the first time. I approached the ominous guard tower, announced myself, and ascended the long staircase toward the prison entrance. There is something unsettling about the first time you hear the door click behind you. Yet the biggest surprise was not the unsettling confinement, but the students I was about to meet. I had great plans for imparting my superior knowledge of Christian faith and its life implications to the program participants. But when I arrived, I realized that the awaiting class would not only be students, but they would be fellow dialogue partners on the Christian journey. In particular, I was impressed by their knowledge of church history, theology, and the ability of one student to quote Thomas à Kempis.

The participants, who would soon become friends, had amassed an incredible knowledge of the Christian faith and its history from an extensive religious library in the prison. I was a little jealous of their selection. That's why I am outraged this week to read the following in The New York Times:

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The Bureau of Prisons has created a list of acceptable religious books from various faiths and excluded all others. In the name of cleansing the library of radical beliefs, some of the greatest Christian authors have been removed. Who are some of the purged authors? Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Cardinal Avery Dulles, just to name a few. Additionally, the Bureau of Prisons has refused to pay for re-stocking the libraries after the purge, leaving many religious libraries near empty.

In our world and especially in a prison system, where religious faith often seems to divide, my friends in Life Connections, assisted by their extensive religious library, deepened not only their faith but had a profound and positive impact upon Leavenworth federal prison. The purging of religious books from a federal institution hampers not only the discipleship of prisoners, but it should cause us to pause and ask ourselves how this happened in the name of freedom and safety.

Kevin Lum is the congregational network coordinator for Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

Many students will groan when I point out these inevitable signs of the times, and an equally inevitable conclusion. August is upon us. Summer is quickly winding down. And this can only mean one thing: school is just around the corner!

I was reminded of this fact yesterday as I sent off my book order for the course I’m teaching at Harvard Divinity School this fall. If you’re looking for some late-summer reading, consider the following titles:

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture

John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus

E.J. Dionne Jr., One Electorate Under God?

Susannah Heschel (ed), Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays

Richard Land, The Divided States of America? What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match!

Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God with Politics and Losing Their Way

Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage

Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America

David Kuo, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction

Michael Gerson, Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't)

Ronald Thiemann, Religion in Public Life: A Dilemma For Democracy

Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

More Bible passages ignored by the Left Behind books.

It's particularly ironic that the judgment scene in Kingdom Come, the 16th Left Behind book, quotes verbatim from Matthew 25, in which Christ sends those who do not help the hungry, the naked, the sick, or the stranger to hell. A priority on helping the sick was nowhere in evidence, say, when protagonist Buck was responding to the huge cataclysms featured earlier. After the giant earthquake, for example, Buck makes a very brief attempt to help one victim, then decides to be a Bad Samaritan, keeping "his eyes straight ahead as despairing, wounded people waved or screamed out to him" for help (and never repenting of this later).

With regard to the hungry, the Left Behind protagonists also flout Matthew 25:

"... the Bible predicts inflation and famine - the black horse. As the rich get richer, the poor starve to death ..."
"So if we survive the war, we need to stockpile food?"
Bruce nodded. "I would."

In other words, if you see your neighbor hungry, build yourself bigger barns. Later, authorial mouthpiece character Tsion Ben-Judah offers his huge flock "practical suggestions for storing goods." The image of middle-class Christians stockpiling while the poor starve is all too close to today's ugly reality – so the storyline avoids the problem by skipping virtually any mention of famine (in sharp contrast to the other three horsemen).

The Left Behind books do make a big deal of a threat that can fit into their paranoia about government: the economic boycott of those without the mark of the beast. But this boycott isn't so literal either: when I left off reading the books, the heroes were planning to circumvent it by creating a food co-op selling to "a market of millions of saints," from which they would take "a reasonable percentage, and finance the work of the Tribulation Force." It's hard not to see this as a thinly veiled metaphor for the Left Behind franchise itself - and even harder to see this as having anything to do with Matthew 25.

Worse still, the body of Christ is not just seen as a market, but reduced to an audience. TheLeft Behind books I've read have surprisingly little use for church except as a place for one-way transmission of information. And, after the giant earthquake at the end of book three destroys the sanctuary of Buck and Rayford's church, the church community just disappears from the story, without explanation (they can't all be dead)! So much for meeting together to encourage one another, all the more as we see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:25).

Instead of group worship, we get the image of Ben-Judah, hiding in an underground shelter, beaming his prophetic interpretation out via a Web site that grows to be "ten times more popular than any other in history." "Pretty much every … believer in the world" logs on – apparently, if folks in the global South, or poor neighborhoods near you, can't afford DSL, they might as well not exist.

The novel repeatedly shows the protagonists exulting as the Web site's visit counter registers higher and higher numbers - a perfect image of the Body of Christ reduced to an impersonal mass market. Later, the antichrist inexplicably lets Ben-Judah MC a huge conference in a stadium, broadcast to "the biggest TV audience in history." But, while you focus on those onstage, there's no need to relate to the brother or sister next to you. Even at the last judgment, in Kingdom Come, God stage-manages things so that you only hear the "well done, good and faithful servant" of biblical celebrities and your personal friends, not "strangers."

So go ahead, Left Behind, be literal: tell me to dig up the lawn (if I had one) because Revelation 8:7 says all grass will be burnt up, even though grass still exists in Revelation 9:4. But don't tell me that, because Jesus is coming soon, I should act arrogant, hoard belongings, and ditch my local church community. That's just literally unbelievable.

Elizabeth Palmberg, assistant editor of Sojourners, recommends Sojourners' discussion guide on apocalypse and the other contents of www.sojo.net - but definitely not as a substitute for participation in your local faith community..

At the close of the 16th and final Left Behind book, which was perched on the best-seller list a couple months ago, Tim LaHaye yet again emphasizes his claim to "tak[e] the Bible literally wherever possible." I don't get how anyone who'd ever paid attention to the Psalms could imply that the Bible speaks less powerfully when it chooses to speak in symbolic images.

But what I really object to, having plowed through the first five and the last one of the Left Behind books, are the number of Bible passages that the series doesn't take seriously - passages that give clear instructions about how people should act.

For example, consider the third Left Behind book's take on Matthew 10:27-28's call to proclaim God's word openly. Protagonist Buck, realizing that his late pastor Bruce had hooked up the church's small tribulation-fallout shelter to the Internet via a satellite dish on the steeple, quotes the "proclaim from the housetops" passage verbatim, then enthuses, "Wasn't it just like Bruce to take the Bible literally?"

I do not think that word means what they think it means. At this very moment, our hero Buck is hiding his faith in order to work for the Antichrist. (Yes, he's doing it to spy on the Antichrist. No, it's not clear how anyone familiar with Revelation could think anything excused working for the Antichrist).

Nor does Buck's father-in-law, Rayford (also employed by the Antichrist), seem very serious or literal about scripture when counseling a new convert (employed by … you guessed it) to hide his faith:

"...if I were you, I wouldn't be quick to declare myself a new believer. ..."
"Yeah, but what about that verse about confessing with your mouth?"
"I have no idea. Do the rules still stand at a time like this?"

Yes. Yes, they do.

Nor does the series take literally 1 Peter 3's encouragement to always be ready to tell others about our hope "with gentleness and reverence." In the Left Behind novels, Rayford and Buck sometimes stop playing with spy gadgets long enough to join secondary characters in telling others about God. They get this half right: they repeatedly describe their own faith journeys - but they often have an ungentle, even arrogant refusal to speak in terms relevant to others.

In the most spectacular example, Rayford opens by telling one potential convert, "You understand I don't care what you think of me, don't you?" But really, not having to care what others think is, from the Left Behind novels' point of view, the main payoff of global cataclysms:

Rayford leaned close and spoke louder. "What you think of me would have been hugely important a few weeks ago [before "the rapture"] …"

Where Revelation was written to reassure genuinely oppressed believers that God was more powerful than the state and culture that persecuted them, Left Behind appears to be written to relieve its audience, which enjoys immense wealth and civil liberties by world standards, of the burden of having faith in things unseen, or of connecting to others who have a different worldview. Forget all that stuff about people knowing you are Christians by your love – about which, more in the second installment of this review.

Elizabeth Palmberg is assistant editor of Sojourners, and a big fan of Sojourners' discussion guide on apocalypse.