Intimidating Intelligence Dims the Brights

Over on the Evangel blog, Gayle Trotter reviews Mary Eberstadt’s new book, The Loser Letters :

The Loser Letters, Eberstadt’s first published work of fiction, draws on a long satirical tradition from Juvenal to The Screwtape Letters. Eberstadt’s protagonist, a young woman named A. F. Christian (as in, “A Former Christian”), details the journey of her enlightened abandonment of her “cradle Dullness” (namely, her Christian faith) and her adaptation to atheism. Christian writes excited, star-struck letters to the self-described so-called “Brights” of the New Atheism, in which she gushes about the Brights’ superiority while candidly evaluating the weaknesses that limit the New Atheism’s ability to win new converts. With this device, Eberstadt delivers a gripping story line with a chilling twist at the end and, in the process, administers a smackdown of the New Atheism.

“It is difficult not to write satire,” Juvenal said in the tumult of ancient Rome. In the cultural tumult of modern America, Eberstadt makes the New Atheism seem easy to mock.

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