atheism

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Law professor Phillip E. Johnson -- A rare Christian apologist from Cal Berkeley

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Law professor Phillip E. Johnson -- A rare Christian apologist from Cal Berkeley

Phillip E. Johnson was doing what a University of California at Berkeley law professor was supposed to do during a mid-career sabbatical.

The former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren had punched the academic clock -- hard -- and earned tenure. Now it was time to pause and look ahead after a divorce and his disappointing failure to land a judicial appointment. He had also converted to Christianity.

Visiting a London bookstore, he purchased "The Blind Watchmaker" by atheist Richard Dawkins of Oxford. Blitzing through that book led straight to another, Michael Denton's "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis." Johnson was no scientist, but he was fascinated by the rhetoric being used to crush debates about Darwinism.

"As a student of legal argument, I knew that how you state questions almost always determines the answers that you get," Johnson told me, during a 2002 conference at Palm Beach Atlantic University (where I was teaching at that time). "I knew that if I jumped into this fight it would take over my life. I would have people firing at me from all sides. It would cause incredible complications for me at Berkeley. 

"It would change everything. That was irresistible, of course."

Johnson found these kinds of debates irresistible, right up until his death on Nov. 2 at age 79, after years of struggles caused by two strokes.

Through it all, his goal was to "united the divided and divide the united, especially when the united were smug elites who felt no need to defend what they claimed to believe. … Christian elites of that kind bothered him just as much, if not more, than all the others," said philosopher John Mark Reynolds, president of The Saint Constantine School in Houston.

"We once joked that if all of the causes we were backing ended up winning, he would probably change sides -- since the odds were good we would become insufferable, like everybody else."

As a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School, Johnson had zero insecurity about his skills in intellectual combat. He was an academic samurai brave enough to air his heretical ideas about Darwin in a faculty-lounge forum a year after his London sabbatical. His Berkeley colleagues were not amused.

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Beyond tweets and text messages: Many young believers evolve into accidental hermits

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Beyond tweets and text messages: Many young believers evolve into accidental hermits

It was the feast of St. Mary, Mother of the Church, so writer Leah Libresco and some friends decided to have a traditional procession through their neighborhood, while praying the Rosary out loud.

"I live in New York City, where this was still not the weirdest thing that anyone would see that day," said Libresco, speaking earlier this winter at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The procession received some puzzled looks along Broadway, near Lincoln Center. Their images of St. Mary sure didn't match the vision of womanhood seen in advertisements they passed.

This wasn't a public statement. All these New Yorkers were doing was celebrating the feast together, creating a face-to-face community with faith, food and fellowship. There's more to life than sitting at home, firing tweets and text messages at the world.

Long ago, Libresco explained, ascetic monks called "stylites" believed they should spend their lives fasting and praying while living atop pillars. This kind of solitude, obviously, was not for the average believer.

Today, many Americans have become "accidental stylites," she said. They are isolated from one another by jammed schedules, job demands and all those digital devices that were supposed to aid communication.

"A lot of folks wind up living hermetic lives, living their faith alone -- nakedly before God -- without the assistance of a monastic superior, or a community or anything else," she said. While monks carefully choose lives of solitude, that path would be "a terrible idea for the rest of us."

Once known as a popular atheist blogger, Libresco began exploring spiritual disciplines after converting to Catholicism in 2012. Her new book is called "Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name." The title is a reference to journalist Rod Dreher's bestseller "The Benedict Option," which challenged modern believers to build local support networks -- involving education, the arts, even small businesses -- in an increasingly post-Christian America. Dreher (a friend of mine for 20 years) wrote the foreword for Libresco's book.

Building on Dreher's manifesto, Libresco wants to encourage Christian hospitality in settings more intense than young-adult gatherings offering shallow chitchat over wine and cheese.

"My goal, always, in building the Benedict Option, is not to turn away from the world," she wrote. "Feeling the need for the thicker community of the Benedict Option … isn't the same as rejecting the world or fearing it. … A claustrophobic feeling can creep into your spiritual life when you practice it alone."

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Jordan Peterson: The Devil's in the details of all those YouTube debates (Part I)

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Jordan Peterson: The Devil's in the details of all those YouTube debates (Part I)

The YouTube seekers are out there, hundreds of thousands of them, clicking on links to philosophical and even theological debates that would shock those who believe cyberspace is about Donald Trump, cat videos and that's that.

These videos feature real people -- some famous and some only Internet-famous. The superstars can sell out civic auditoriums while discussing theism and atheism, the search for absolute truth and what it means to be a mature person living in a world awash in information, opinion, beauty and noise.

At the center of lots of these debates sits University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, whose career built on hundreds of academic papers has veered into the digital marketplace of ideas. That happens when a professor's latest book, "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos" sells 2 million copies, while he has 922,000 Twitter followers and 1.5 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.

Critics are sure to ask faith questions when a professor constantly discusses how troubled souls -- especially Millennial generation men -- can make decisions that change their lives, noted Bishop Robert Barron, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles and a popular Catholic online apologist.

Peterson is a "depth psychologist," not a theologian, stressed Barron, and he has sent complex, mixed signals about the Bible and Christianity.

Nevertheless, it's impossible to avoid the moral content of his work. Consider this pithy Peterson advice: "Start to stop doing, right now, what you know to be wrong."

"He is, somewhat, assuming the mantle of spiritual father and he's speaking, especially, to younger people about -- you know -- rules. Life is not just a matter of self-expression and I make it up as I go along," said Barron, in an online video commentary about Peterson's work. "There are these rules that are grounded in our psychological and physical structure that you can see, up and down the centuries of tradition. Peterson kind of moves boldly into that space of spiritual teacher."