My Conversion Story Featured on Fr. Barron’s Word on Fire

A different (and shorter) version of my conversion story is being featured on Father Robert Barron’s Word on Fire site today.

Father Barron is arguably the most talented Catholic evangelist of the last few decades in the English-speaking world. While you are at the site, take a look at his videos and weekly sermons. They are first-rate excursions into the workings of Christian faith.

Forbes “100 Most Powerful Women” vs. Edith Stein

One need not believe in salvation history, the Bible, or even God to recognize the sharp contrast that Christian stories make when compared to stories about the political and everyday world.

Take, for example, the story reported this week by Forbes Magazine (and circulated throughout the wider media) of the world’s “100 most powerful women.” At the top of the list is Michelle Obama, the wife of the most politically powerful man in the world, herself independently wealthy, and a graduate of the most prestigious universities in the country.

With a vulgarity that is perhaps to be expected from a magazine whose most noteworthy journalistic contribution is an annual list of the rich and powerful, Forbes cites under the First Lady’s “money” column the “national budget” at approximately “$3,520 B” (that foreboding “B,” of course, stands for “billion.”)

In assuming that wealth is the true measure of power, the staff of Forbes Magazine shares with Karl Marx the belief that power is best conceptualized in material terms.

Lady Gaga: # 7 Forbes Most Powerful Women

Second on this year’s list is the CEO of Kraft, Irene Rosenfeld, (whose sales last month were “$42.308 B”), followed by Oprah Winfrey (“2.7 B”) who rose to wealth and power via a prodigious talent for making gossip and platitudes interesting. The list also includes German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and performers like Lady Gaga whose talent straddles (pun intended) the musical and the erotic.

What, by contrast, is the Christian view of power? Consider, in brief summary, the life of a woman deemed among the most powerful in the entire twentieth century by the Catholic Church. Her name is Edith Stein

Bob Dylan as Christian rebel?

G. K. Chesterton once wrote of his character Gabriel that being surrounded by “every conceivable kind of revolt” he was left with no choice but to revolt “into the only thing left — sanity.”

This quote has often occurred to me when thinking of the life of Bob Dylan, who although no longer a professed Christian, has perhaps never been more rebellious than when he turned to the Christian faith in the 1980s, or when he released a very non-ironic collection of Christian carols — “Christmas in the Heart” — last year.

Yet, even Dylan’s more popular and less ostensibly religious music has arguably always been informed by a very strong Biblical sensibility. How so? Watch this fascinating revisionist interpretation of Dylan’s music by Robert Barron:

(photo courtesy of Flickr/pingnews.com)

Two Reasons for Rejecting Richard Dawkins’ “Protest the Pope” Speech

First, it is a shame Mr. Dawkin’s does not have the same respect for the intellectual discipline of history which he so admirably has shown for biology.

Note to Atheists: Religion Is Not Dead

Buddhist Children in Mongolia, 2009

Once again militant atheist attempts to eradicate religion through the exercise of state power are showing signs of longterm failure. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that after decades of aggressively atheistic, Communist rule  in Mongolia, Buddhism against all odds is flourishing once more.

The atheist-fundamentalists in our own country who are growing louder, angrier and less intelligent with every passing year (Christopher Hitchens and his admirers in particular come to mind) would do well to meditate on the following from the L.A. Times story:

Stephen Hawking Revisited: Responding to Readers’ Criticisms

Pope Benedict blesses Stephen Hawking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican, 2008

I received a considerable, mostly hostile response via personal correspondence to my latest post criticizing Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design. This post also garnered an influx of traffic from the wilds of our increasingly atheistic culture that came to view the modern bestiary of we few remaining retrogrades — we Christians.

However, one vital point did become clearer to me throughout this intellectual tumult.

Stephen Hawking’s Not So Grand Design

Dr. Stephen Hawking giving a talk

Believers as various as Thomas Aquinas and Sir Isaac Newton have held that God is necessary to explain why there is a universe at all instead of nothing. Yet at least since the seventeenth century atheists have disputed this assumption.

The latest onslaught comes in the form of physicist Stephen Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, which asserts that God as the creator of time, space, matter and form is an unnecessary hypothesis because the universe happened “spontaneously from nothing.”

Needless to say Dr. Hawking’s views are incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But allow me first to explain the theistic view.

For theists, God is the answer to the question “why is there something instead of nothing?”

Christopher Hitchens: Head Zookeeper

Mr. Christopher Hitchens and a young fan

In his latest column, Christopher Hitchens gives us a good motto for what will probably be the last phase of his work as a writer by penning the following line: the “domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.”

Though pithy as ever, Mr. Hitchens’ choice of words — “domestication,” “chores,” — perhaps unintentionally betrays the fatigue inherent in his brand of humanism, limited as it is by the task of looking after the moral tidiness of sophisticated monkeys.

The Conversion of a Young Atheist

Conversion 1: A Hell of Time

“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way / I found myself within a shadowed forest / For I had lost the path that does not stray.” – Dante, The Inferno (I : 1-3)

The story of my conversion is the story of how one worldview I had broke down not merely as a way of thinking but as a way of life. In October of 2005, at the age of twenty five, with a pale face and my new beard thinner than it is now, I lay on a plastic covered mattress in an emergency room off Seventh Avenue in New York City, staring up at the dirty fluorescent ceiling certain that I would die.