The New Intolerance
presented by Mary Eberstadt
First Things invites you to view a lecture featuring Mary Eberstadt. The lecture, delivered on November 11, 2014 in Washington DC, addresses the problem of, and possible reactions to, what we’re calling the New Intolerance—the mentality that seeks to intimidate religious believers with charges of “fundamentalism” and “bigotry.”
A new, secular “moral majority” is rising in America today. This rising tide of secularism has coincided with, and in some ways is helping to drive, the undoing of the American social contract. Christians in particular are faced with the challenge of protecting human dignity, objective moral values, religious liberty, and authentic freedom in the face of growing hostility toward religious faith and religious believers. Many secularists today want Christianity to be discredited as “intolerant,” because Christianity and Christians are in the way of demolishing traditional moral limits so that they can be reconstructed to accord with the desires and needs of the powerful, who don’t like being hindered.
While First Things has already taken up these charges within its pages, this lecture engages the problem in a more immediate way. We invite you to join us as we continue this important conversation.
Mary Eberstadt is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. She is the author of several influential books including How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (2013); Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution (2012); and the fiction The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism (2010). Mrs. Eberstadt has written for many outlets, including TIME, TIMEIdeas, National Review, National Review Online, Policy Review, Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Claremont Review of Books, the American Spectator, and other venues. Columnist David Brooks has twice awarded her a “Sidney” prize for best essay writing of the year. She has been a frequent contributor to First Things, where recent pieces include “Revolving Revolutions,” “Bacchanalia Unbound,” “Pro-Animal, Pro-Life,” and “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae.” She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by Seton Hall University on May 19, 2014.
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