Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Great review of what seems like an interesting book...




"I'm lost in admiration for Lamin Sanneh's magnificent study of world Christianity, for the work's geographical scope and historical sweep, and for the breadth of the author's learning. Throughout, Sanneh asks the critical question: how can we reconceive Christianity in a way that frees it from its European and imperial contexts, permitting the faith to adapt to the kaleidoscopic realities of different societies around the globe. This is a splendid achievement." --Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom and The New Faces of Christianity



By Matt K. "happy reader" (Michigan, USA)

A spate of recent works on "world (or global) Christianity," including Philip Jenkins' widely read "The Next Christendom" (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), have drawn needed attention to one of the most striking developments of the past century: the rise of a "Post-Western Christianity" which is now firmly rooted and growing dramatically in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In his recent book, "Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity," Lamin Sanneh sets out to describe some of the "pillars" or roots of this worldwide Christian awakening, which he calls the "Third Awakening" (p. 274). It is a wide-ranging study that chronicles the fascinating, if somewhat messy, story of Christianity's naturalization (or "inculturation") and growth among various peoples throughout its history. It is the story of Christianity becoming "the most diverse and pluralist religion in the world." To tell the story, Sanneh focuses on certain themes ("pillars") that define "world Christianity," and then illustrates them in multiple ways, drawing out interesting implications along the way.

It is an eye-opening study that contains fascinating, and sometimes myth-busting insights about our understanding of the nature of the Christian religion, our understanding of Western missions, and the role of local agency and native resources in the spread of Christianity. Anyone interested in the worldwide Christian movement or current events would greatly benefit from Professor Sanneh's thorough study.

Let me offer one small warning: someone reading "Disciples of All Nations" without a decent background in the history of Christian missions may well find this book overwhelming. Sanneh has such a remarkable breadth of knowledge and draws his examples from such a variety of contexts that I sometimes struggled to stay with him. At times, Sanneh rather abruptly turns to particular historical examples that feel more like extended rabbit trails than helpful contributions to the flow of his argument. The book would have been much strengthened by clearer organization. Still, in spite of this, I warmly recommend the book.

One of Sanneh's dominant themes that emerges again and again is that Christianity has a "peculiar temper"(p. 12) acquired through its long encounter with a dizzying diversity of cultural, political and social contexts. "The characteristic pattern of Christianity's engagement with the languages and cultures of the world has God at the center of the universe of cultures, implying equality among cultures and the...relative status of cultures vis a vis the truth of God. No culture is so advanced or so superior that it can claim exclusive access or advantage to the truth of God, and none so marginal...that it can be excluded. All have merit, none is indispensable" (p. 25).

As such, Christianity both absorbs and transforms the cultures it encounters. It spreads by making local appropriations and adaptations with local cultural resources, while investing those preexisting materials with new meaning and purpose. All that is to say, one reason for Christianity's appeal as a world religion is that it is a "translated and translating" religion, a religion with an "amazing power of adaptation" which enables it to speak to the heart of human beings in exceedingly diverse historical and cultural situations.

If this "peculiar temper" of Christianity is one of the faith's greatest strengths, it has too often been hindered by notions of cultural superiority, and connections to political power. Sanneh shows, again through a multitude of examples, the "heavy price" that has often been paid when Christianity's "intrinsic character as a worldwide religion... was framed in the uniform tenets of Christendom," and thus used to justify exploitation and domination (p. 54).

In the West, this is an often-told story: the story of missionary complicity in colonial imperialism. Sanneh is not shy to point out many examples of this. But, he is quick to add, though western scholarship and popular opinion would have us believe otherwise, that is not the whole story.

Sanneh writes, "I am urging a revisionist history without claiming that missions and colonialism were not in cahoots." So while acknowledging the colonial connections and mindset of many missions, Sanneh contends that "the frontier experience... ultimately transformed missions' agenda and modus operandi," so that many missionaries repudiated their ties to the colonial powers and worked for local empowerment in the cause of Christ. There were many shining examples of this throughout missions history. Missions saw increasingly that though the Gospel was a universal message meant to flourish in any and every cultural milieu, the "crushing burden" of "Europeandom" had muted the Gospel and robbed it of its power.

Moreover, wether consciously or unconsciously, missionaries who translated the Bible into local vernacular languages, and who preached the essentials of Christianity, often sowed the seeds of local empowerment that contributed to the undermining of colonial domination.

Bible translation, it turned out, was a great act of cultural affirmation and empowerment. Bible translation work also produced grammars and lexicons for languages that otherwise might have disappeared.

Though Sanneh devotes a great deal of attention to foreign missions, that is not his ultimate focus; to focus on Western missions would be to misread Sanneh. Throughout "Disciples of All Nations," he explicitly shifts the focus from expatriate initiative to local reception, from foreign control to native direction. This is another crucial and convincing aspect of Sanneh's argument.

Sanneh claims that scholarship related to the growth of Christianity in Africa and the colonial era often makes the same mistake the colonial powers made: they ignore the vital, creative, energetic response and involvement of local people themselves.

However, Sanneh contends that this one-sided picture of native passivity in the face of missionary hegemony is far wide of the mark. It soon became clear that while foreigners may have been the initial bearers of Christian teaching to parts of Africa, Africans had taken the ball for themselves and run with it.

In the last chapter of the book, Sanneh points out a similar Chinese appropriation of Christianity which took place in very different circumstances. In its paranoid repression of Christianity as a "foreign religion," the communist revolution in China (itself the bearer of a foreign ideology - Marxism) ironically cleared the decks for the thoroughly Chinese Christian awakening that is currently underway in China (ch. 8).

Returning to Africa, it became clear that Africans wanted Jesus, they wanted the Bible, they wanted healing and miracles and power over evil in the spirit realm (things they found ample evidence for in the Bible), but not the European civilization that was supposed to accompany Christianity (something the Bible seemed to oppose at many points). Sanneh provides a cogent summary: "It is remarkable the extent to which colonial co-option weakened Christianity by presenting it as a freshly minted European creed. Africans rejected that view by circulating the religion as local currency" (p. 161).

On the one hand, then, African Christians brilliantly separated the Christian kernel from the colonial husk, and made Christianity their own. In so doing, they often recaptured the spirit of primal apostolic Christianity against its secularized European counterpart. On the other hand, this story illustrates that Christianity itself, with its "peculiar temper" refused to be domesticated. It is almost as if Christianity itself was just waiting to shake off its colonial baggage and break out in fresh ways in these new contexts.

In the end, by putting the Christian movement into the broader context which I have attempted to summarize above, Lamin Sanneh has convincingly shown that the present growth of world Christianity, while unprecedented in its scale, is not at all out of character. By carefully demonstrating the "peculiar temper" of Christianity, the two-sided process of Christian expansion (missionary outreach and local appropriation), and the "serial nature" of Christian history, Sanneh has helped us to see again that Christianity is a dynamic world religion, a religion able to flourish and be "at home" in a wide variety of cultural, linguistic, social and political contexts.

This may be surprising in certain quarters, for example, where the Western pedigree of Christianity has been long assumed, or where the supernaturalism of Christianity has been long assumed discredited. But this surprise may well say more about the cultural or ideological captivity of these quarters than it does about the true nature of the faith.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Ok, one last post...Breaking Free of the Web: Catholics and Internet Addiction

ROCKY BALBOA


I'm taking a break from all the politics and theology and foreign films and dramas and documetaries and 'worthy' shit --I'm going back to basics, and will try to stay away from this electronic crack pipe interweb for a while and try and get some stuff done. So adios, reader[s?] - I am off to watch Rocky Balboa and drink some Jamesons...

Check out the reviews at RottenTomatoes

e.g:

ROCKY BALBOA

by Mark Bell
(2006-12-20)
2006, Rated PG, 102 minutes, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

I spent the better part of my life in South Jersey, about 10 miles outside of Philadelphia. Most of my extended family and loved ones still call the area home. I offer up this bit of information because I’m admitting to a bias of being a Philadelphia loyalist all the way through. And beyond the Liberty Bell, Phillie Phanatic, soft pretzels and cheesesteaks, few things are as inherently Philadelphia as the character Rocky Balboa. Hell, a statue of Rocky (a fictional character) stood outside the Philadephia Spectrum for 25 years before being moved to the bottom of the Philadephia Museum of Art's steps. To know Philly and love Philly is to love Rocky. And I love Philly, which is why the latest installment in the “Rocky” franchise could be the greatest catastrophe (as if “Rocky V” didn’t already earn that status) or the most inspiring success...

...“Rocky V,” by and large, was a colossal disappointment and went a long way towards burying the Rocky franchise. What “Rocky Balboa” does is dig up the body and re-bury it, properly. When this film ends, and the credits begin to roll, there is finally closure for this franchise and for the Rocky character himself, as the final fight did what it needed to do, it sated and defeated the beast within. As a Philly loyalist, I was not disappointed at all with this effort, and at moments was even inspired. Stallone did what he needed to do, and he’s got my respect for taking all the criticism and flack just to end things the right way.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Acts of Hope-Challenging Empire on the World Stage, By Rebecca Solnit

Chalmers Johnson on "military Keynesianism" and imperial bankruptcy

This is a clip from a new film, "Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony," in Cinema Libre Studios' Speaking Freely series in which Johnson discusses "military Keynesianism" and imperial bankruptcy.

Fresh posts at NonviolentJesus

More on Taylor from Jack: "Retrieval of an Unflattened Wor(l)d"

Audio and transcript of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence"

delivered 4 April 1967 at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

Friday, January 18, 2008

PLEASE check out the blog 'Nonviolent Jesus'

Jesus for President - Politics for Ordinary Radicals




Chapter/Section Summaries

Section 1
A good Creation of love and beauty takes a turn for the worse, landing it in a murderous chaos. What to do? Flood it and start fresh? Build a tower that reaches heaven? Appoint an adventurous elderly couple to lead the people out of the nations to the Promised Land? Something has to save humanity from themselves …

Section 2
The construction of a set-apart people into a living temple of blessing is going so-so. The solution: God puts skin on to show the world what love looks like. But here’s the catch: the Prince of Peace is born as a refugee in the middle of a genocide and is rescued from the trash bin of imperial executions to stand at the pinnacle of this peculiar people. A strange way to start a revolution …

Section 3
Flags on altars, images of the gods on money … Caesar is colonizing our imaginations. What has happened to the slaughtered Lamb, the Prince of Peace? There seems to be another gospel spreading across the empire, and two Kingdoms are colliding. What is a Jesus-follower to do when the empire gets baptized?

Section 4
Snapshots of political imagination … the question is not are we political, but how are we political. Not are we relevant, but are we peculiar? The answer lies in how we embody what we believe. Our greatest challenge is to maintain the distinctiveness of our faith in a world gone mad. And all of creation waits, groans, for a people who live God’s dream with fresh imagination.

The Times, They Are A-Changin'?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Bruno Barnhart podcasts


Episode 1 [4] | Episode 2 [5]
Drag both episodes into your iTunes library [6]

Our hunger for wisdom

Bruno Barnhart is a Camaldolese monk of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, Calif. He is the author of The Good Wine: Reading John from the Center (Paulist, 1993) and Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity (Paulist 1999), and co-editor of Purity of Heart and Contemplation: A Monastic Dialogue Between Christian and Asian Traditions (Continuum, 2001). His latest book is The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity (Continuum, 2007).

Episode 1: Sapiential hunger, hunger for wisdom (26 min.)
"A lot of people when they write about mysticism, they look at that experience as the end, the goal of the spiritual life," Fr. Barnhart tells Tom Fox. "But I think it is more like the beginning. You go from there. Something is put into you which takes the rest of your life to work it out, to express it, to incarnate it, to make it real in the world."

Episode 2: The paradox of wisdom (31 min.)
Look at First Corinthians, verse 1, Fr. Barnhart tells Tom Fox. "Usually you think of wisdom as a kind of fattening, by which we get larger and larger in our minds and we can bring more and more things together into a synthetic vision. But Paul seems to be talking about the opposite. He’s talking about falling into a black hole. That’s the paradox of Christian wisdom. All the wisdom disappears at a certain point, because we live in a world and an economy of faith. Wisdom seems to go on the drain on you. But it recovers when you need it. It is the wisdom of the cross."

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Dr. King's final refusal to give up

"It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It's nonviolence or nonexistence."

-Martin Luther King, April 3, 1968,

Word on Fire

"Christianity is not a gnosticism grounded in ahistorical myths, but rather a revelation religion based upon certain very key historical events wherein God disclosed himself to us. At its best, historical criticism orients us to this truth. The principal vice of the historical-critical method is its epistemological imperialism, by which I mean its tendency to do its work in abstraction from the dogmatic and doctrinal tradition of the church. Both Küng and Schillebeeckx—to give only two examples among many—bracket the Chalcedonian and Nicene doctrinal statements and attempt to articulate the meaning of Jesus afresh, on the basis of their historical-critical retrieval. This is a grave problem. The attraction of the "Jesus as symbol" approach—practiced by Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Rahner among many others—is that it presents a Jesus who is easy to believe in, for he functions only as a cipher for a pre-existing spiritual experience. But such a Christ is, as Kierkegaard noted long ago, not really worth believing."

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Saturday, January 12, 2008

"The Trouble With Our State"



By Daniel Berrigan

The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare.

Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rarer; it was disappearing like immigrant's disease.

You've heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the plague of media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind.

It flows softly; whispers
don't rock the boat!
The sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.

The trouble with our state
--we learned only afterward
when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead
and civil virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip

--our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege--
was
Civil
Obedience.

* * * * * To order the new CD of poetry read by Daniel Berrigan, go to www.yellowbikepress.com .
Or call: 1-718-213-4209.

Elizabeth Johnson's 'Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God' (Continuum, 2007),


[Excerpts - click title for full article]


...It’s just assumed that God is this single individual with more power than anyone else, who intervenes now and then to get certain things done, and whom you need to satisfy on a number of levels. Again, this isn’t the God of Christian revelation. When you hear talk radio or people in the press talking about God, this is the God they’re talking about. This image is so unworthy of us.

...I see a terrific hunger for a mature faith, but that’s not being fed by much of the preaching that people hear, most of which also uses this stale idea of God...

...Before the Enlightenment, were biblical images more alive in the church?
I don’t want to paint any age as the golden era, including our own, although I think we’re in a renaissance right now. If you look at the Middle Ages, you see God spoken of as “the fountain fullness overflowing.” Richard of St. Victor speaks of the deep relationality that is at the heart of God.

Theologians in the Middle Ages wrote tomes on these ideas. We didn’t have anyone doing that during the Enlightenment, with the exception of Cardinal John Henry Newman in England, but he went back and read the Fathers of the church, which caused the whole God question to open up for him again.

The Enlightenment didn’t touch the East in the same way. Even today if you read Christian Orthodox theologians, you get a much different sense of the fullness of God’s trinitarian life, inviting the world into communion. It’s so different from this monarchical, solitary ruler God that we have, the God about whom we ask questions like, “Why is God letting this illness happen to me? What did I do that’s wrong?”

What is attractive about this idea of God?
This all-powerful God can bless you or curse you; therefore you better please him to get the blessing and not the curse. That’s a pattern of relationship that people have with their parents. It’s familiar. It brings a certain measure of security. Also many people don’t know any other God. They haven’t been exposed to any other understandings.

...But in general I think the image of the theistic God is very widespread in our country. You hear it in sermons. And it’s not just me saying this: The U.S. bishops have said that preaching in our country is in a very bad way in terms of the Catholic tradition. The late German theologian Karl Rahner, S.J. was saying the same thing back in the 1950s and ’60s. He said that the words of the preacher fall powerlessly from the pulpit “like birds frozen to death and falling from a winter sky.” I sit and listen to some sermons and I think, “Come on, think of all the wonderful things you could say with this text.”

How does one’s theology of God affect one’s everyday life and faith?
If you’re a believing person, you draw your deepest values from that. How you make moral decisions and vocational decisions, how you treat other people—it all flows from how you see God working.

None of the newer theologies of God are innocent in terms of politics. Every one of the ideas I explore in my book has political implications. They are concerned with power and who uses it and the powerless and how they are affected. So if you let any one of those theologies get into your understanding, you’re going to vote differently, you’re going to volunteer differently, you’re going to use your money differently. Theology, I think, can be very powerful as a tool. It’s my conviction that we all have a theology, so how it shapes your life depends on what it is.


...What are some of the theologies of God that you’ve been investigating?
They include images from feminist theology, from Latin America and from Latinos in the United States, as well as the God who emerges from encounters with religious pluralism. Also God as envisioned in Europe after the Holocaust, God as seen through the African American experience, and several others.

Each of the new images of God I studied has biblical grounding, each refers in some way to the Trinity, each of them is oriented in some way to religious practice. All of them support the idea that God is deeply involved, deeply concerned with what happens in the world. If you love God, then your heart needs to be conformed and configured to God’s heart. You have to feel that way toward the world as well. There will certainly be differences of opinion about how to do that.

You mentioned the Trinity. This solo God of the Enlightenment doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Trinity.

The Trinity has been just about lost forever in the West. Cardinal Walter Kasper, who heads the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in the Vatican, says the Holy Spirit is the Cinderella of theology in the West, in the kitchen doing all the work while the other two get to go to the ball.

The view of God in classical theism also does not see God through the lens of Jesus Christ, which is basic to the Christian understanding of God. Therefore it leaves out everything that is beautiful and attractive and that makes people want to be Christian. Jesus and his life, death, and Resurrection just don’t factor in.

The new theologies from Africa and Latin America, on the other hand, are examples of a new kind of trinitarian theology. They don’t let Christ and the Spirit drop away. They’re rooted in an understanding of God related to the world. These understandings are so basic to Christian faith and tradition, I call them a gift to all the rest of us.

You frequently use the term “the living God.” What does that mean?
It’s a term found all through the Bible. I love it. The living God is always ahead of us, always surprising, always calling us to come ahead. Wherever “the living God” is used, it indicates a life of fullness, of flowing water, new reality, new justice, new peace. The different theologies I studied use different words for it: getting back to the God of the Bible, the God of Jesus Christ, the God of life.


...What is revelation then?
In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, revelation became highly intellectualized. It came down to doctrine: We knew certain truths, certain beliefs. You’re a Christian if you believe this. I would say Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, The Constitution on Divine Revelation, changed all that. Its opening sentence says, “In his goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of his will.” In the gift of God’s own self comes understanding something of who God is, so revelation becomes much more experiential right from the start. That experience is then articulated in words and finally it is written down. We call it revelation.

I always regret that word, revelation. It sounds like an object, but it’s a relational dynamic that has brought to birth wisdom in the Christian community about God and fidelity in the way people live.

What we are called to believe is actually a mystery, God’s own giving self. Rahner uses the image of the horizon: You see it, but you never get there. You can’t control it or comprehend it, because then it wouldn’t be God.

...

Saved by Hope

Insights from Pope Benedict's new encyclical.
By Gerald O'Collins | JANUARY 21, 2008

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Who is Jesus Christ?

Interesting ruminations by Joseph S. O'Leary

Silence

The Catholic Fantastic of Chesterton and Tolkien

Mike Gravel rates Democrat opponents


Congress could do a good job, theoretically, but it can't. Why? Its owned lock, stock, and barrel by corporate America. So you think you're going to become president and you're going to turn to the Congress and say, “Let's really straighten out corporate America.” This is foolishness. It's fantasy.

Video and transcript - 10/01/08

Quote of the Day: Robert Scheer

In response to Gloria Steinem's column asserting that women become more radical as they age, and that's why they voted in N.H. for Clinton:

What is radical about voting for a corporate lawyer who, in defense of her Arkansas savings and loan shenanigans, once said you can't be a lawyer without working for banks? Steinem boasts of Clinton's "unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House" without referencing the Clinton White House's giveaways to corporate America at the expense of poor and working Americans, the majority of them being women. Sen. Clinton's key election operative, Mark Penn, was the other half of the Dick Morris team that recast populist Bill Clinton as the master of triangulation. . . .

Yes, Bill Clinton was a very good president compared to what came immediately before and after, and his wife has many strong points in her favor, not the least of which is her wonkish intelligence. What I object to is the notion that the perspective of gender or race trumps that of economic class in considering the traumas of this nation. That is because the George W. Bush administration engaged in class warfare for the rich with a vengeance that has left many Americans hurting, and we desperately need change to reverse that destructive course.

Let's get our priorities straight, shall we? Having a woman or an African-American president would mean our having reached a wonderful milestone, but it's secondary to the more significant problems that confront us, which have to do with economic structure, power aggregation, and foreign adventurism.

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The Enchantments of Mammon


"Just as Chesterton knew that the ads in the skies were the tokens of a counterfeit paradise, we must see, in the history of capitalism, a celestial aspiration, and in the hunger for riches, a sacramental longing. Even in the fretful dreamlands of late capitalism, the world remains, as Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, charged with the grandeur of God, even as “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”. Any renewal of political hope must rest in the sacraments of the triune God, in what Hopkins, the poet of sacrament, called “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

From "The Enchantments of Mammon" by Eugene McCarraher

Monday, January 7, 2008

John Stephenson R.I.P.



[Life has changed, not ended]

"I believe that our friends among the dead really mind us and look out for us. Often there might be a big boulder of misery over our path about to fall on you, but your friends among the dead hold it back until you have passed by." John O'Donohue, Anam Cara [John O'Donohue made the hike to heaven on January 3, 2008, a day after Big John Stephenson set off for the same destination]





Revelation 21:1-6


"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more
,
for the first things have passed away.’

5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ 6 Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life."

A BLESSING FOR EQUILIBRIUM.



[Picture by John McManus, www.pictureourland.com/

BY JOHN O’DONOHUE, from ‘Benedictus – A Book of Blessings’

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the music of laughter break through your soul.

As the wind wants to make everything dance,
May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the freedom of the monastery bell,
May clarity of mind make your eyes smile.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,
May a sense of irony give you perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May fear or worry never put you in chains.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
To hear in the distance the laughter of God.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, etc


By Steve Paulson, salon.com

The atheist delusion
Theologian John Haught explains why science and God are not at odds, why Mike Huckabee worries him, and why Richard Dawkins and other "new atheists" are ignorant about religion.

By Steve Paulson

Dec. 19, 2007 | Evolution remains the thorniest issue in the ongoing debate over science and religion. But for all the yelling between creationists and scientists, there's one perspective that's largely absent from public discussions about evolution. We rarely hear from religious believers who accept the standard Darwinian account of evolution. It's a shame because there's an important question at stake: How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?

The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other -- to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are "non-overlapping magisteria." But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith -- and even belief in a personal God -- after Darwin and Einstein?

That's the question John Haught has set out to answer by proposing a "theology of evolution." Haught is a Roman Catholic theologian at Georgetown University and a prolific author. His books include "God After Darwin," "Is Nature Enough?" and the forthcoming "God and the New Atheism." He's steeped in evolutionary theory as well as Christian theology. Haught believes Darwin is "a gift to theology." He says evolutionary biology has forced modern theologians to clarify their thinking by rejecting outdated arguments about God as an intrusive designer. Haught reclaims the theology of his intellectual hero, Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died more than half a century ago. Teilhard believed that we live in a universe evolving toward ever greater complexity and, ultimately, to consciousness.

Haught is an intriguing figure in the debate over evolution. He was the only theologian to testify as an expert witness in the landmark 2005 Dover trial that ruled against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Haught testified against intelligent design, arguing that it's both phony science and bad theology. But Haught is also a fierce critic of hardcore atheists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who claim that evolution leads logically to atheism. He says both sides place too much faith in science. "Ironically," Haught writes, "ID advocates share with their ideological enemies, the evolutionary materialists, the assumption that science itself can provide ultimate explanations."

I talked with Haught about the new atheists, Albert Camus, and how evolutionary biology can be a complement to faith. We spoke about why Christian candidates like Mike Huckabee worry him and why science is ultimately not equipped to answer questions about love, consciousness and the Resurrection.

CONTINUE...