The new INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW is out in a classy online edition! It has all kinds of good stuff, including Darwinian Larry’s clearest statement yet on the difference between DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM and METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM. It also includes a review by ME on the D.B. Hart’s wonderfully erudite polemic against atheists old and new. There’s a lot to learn from Hart, although I think he goes too far. Here’s an except from ME:
Every feature of the personal liberation praised by our new atheists and our egalitarian autonomy boosters generally cameinto the world in Christian communities. Even the Stoics didn’t approach theChristians in their indifference to a person’s social status. The Christians were the first to be completely opposed to slavery;the first for raising women to equality in marriage and elsewhere; the first for faithfulness in monogamous marriage; the first for the egalitarian brotherhood of all men. For the Christians, the community of personal love wasn’t some otherworldly hope. Rather, that community was formed by obligations given to divinized beings here and now. Our divinization through Christ includes what is called life after death, but we can live lovingly liberated from death even before we die.
A big difference between Hart and Nietzsche, it should go without saying, is
that Hart doesn’t hate the modern world insofar as it is a Christian accomplishment.
(And every partisan of “Enlightenment rationalism” who buys Jefferson on “monkish ignorance and superstitution” and clerical tyranny as the effectual truth of Christianity needs to read this book.)
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