No, Robert , I didn’t say Richard Dawkins is silly for not fearing the complete annihilation of the self. As you point out, some entirely unsilly people, Socrates and Cicero among them, have felt the same way. I was instead—unsuccessfully, it seems—using sarcasm to point out how condescending Dawkins is being to the vast majority of his fellow human beings who reject—logically, I think—the notion that death is the end and believe instead in the afterlife.
Letters
Joshua T. Katz’s (“Pure Episcopalianism,” May 2025) reason for a theologically conservative person joining a theologically liberal…
The Revival of Patristics
On May 25, 1990, the renowned patristics scholar Charles Kannengiesser, S.J., delivered a lecture at the annual…
The Enduring Legacy of the Spanish Mystics
Last autumn, I spent a few days at my family’s coastal country house in northwestern Spain. The…