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Jun 05, 2006 08:05 PM by Nick Desai
The TNC office is so chock-full of diverse glossies, broadsheets, reviews, and loose-leaf screeds that after yesterday’s mail delivery, I literally had to read myself out from under a suffocating pile of verbiage. And, in escaping, I even came away with something: a trend. If you are an unshakable atheist with a talent for polemics again Islamo-Fascism, what is a la mode? Counterintuitively, perhaps, it’s a peculiar kind of Christianity. Its adherents do not consider the metaphysics underpinning Christian thought to be true, but they appreciate the cultural achievements of believers. Here is Christopher Hitchens, the man who doesn’t “trust anyone who believes in religion”: I don’t have the nostalgia for the lost period of faith. I’m glad it’s over and my children won’t have to know about it. Except from me . . . . I teach them this stuff and they don’t know what I think . . . .And this is snipped from Oriana Fallaci’s New Yorker profile (Her best line: “I must CRUSH the potatoes.”) In September, she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a “Christian atheist,” out of respect for Italy’s Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal for “cultural achievement” . . . .“Christian atheism”? An interesting synthesis of “God is dead” intellectualism and crescendo religiosity among the masses? Of course, two instances do not a trend make. Except in the world of internet trend-spotting, that is, and I have heard that soon that you will be allowed to do it with one or even none at all.
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