Religious prophet
” ’Death makes honest men of all of us,’ says a character in one of [Walker] Percy’s novels. ’It makes people happy to tell the truth after a lifetime of lying.’
“Perhaps it was Percy’s lifetime exposure to death - as a childhood victim of suicide and as a doctor trained to serve bodies in progressive bondage to decay - that enabled the writer to speak honestly about the cultural and spiritual suicide all around us.
“Much of what we see around us today Walker Percy already wrote about, because he saw them coming from his little room in Covington, Louisiana, long before they arrived. Current debates over embryonic stem-cell research, human cloning, and the attempt to bio-chemically alter human nature through medicines designed to numb sadness and to deaden guilt, they’re all there in Percy’s fiction. Thanatos Syndrome-like scientists are still feverishly at work in the search for a chemically accessible Eden.”
- Russell D. Moore, writing on “Walker Percy: Twenty Years Later” on May 5 at his site Moore to the Point
Irreligious boredom
“The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).
“But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists - with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral ’truths,’ their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about ’religion’ in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?”
- David B. Hart, writing on “Believe It or Not” in the May issue of First Things
Religious opacity
“But the disinclination to accept the obvious - as we saw in the Fort Hood shooting - is strong. ’The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex,’ [Ezra] Klein waxes lyrical. Do we really think a man [like Faisal Shahzad] who travels to Pakistan to get bomb training has an opaque heart? Really, maybe he was upset about global warming. Animal rights? …
“This is the mentality that cheers ideas like closing Guantanamo, eschewing enhanced interrogation (if they had captured the suspect and the location of the bomb had been unknown, would the administration have stuck to the Army Field Manual?), Mirandizing terrorists, and tying ourselves in knots to avoid identifying the enemy as Islamic fundamentalists out to butcher Americans. Nothing opaque about that.”
- Jennifer Rubin, writing on “Ezra Klein: The Foreclosure Made Him Do It,” on May 5 at the Commentary blog Contentions
• THE WASHINGTON TIMES can be reached at 125932@example.com.
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