“Now Ralph, you’re a person of faith.” Reed did not disagree. Then Maher said, “And this means that you accept all sorts of things on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.” To my astonishment and chagrin, Reed simply responded, “Yes.” I nearly threw my remote at the television screen.

faith and reason are not opposed to one another but that they are, in point of fact, mutually implicative.

Religion, I argued, is born of the human being’s essentially unlimited capacity to quest, both intellectually and spiritually. Far from shutting down the mind—as is so often claimed by its critics—religion expands the mind and pushes it ever further, toward a properly infinite goal.

I’m convinced that a dumbed-down religion, practiced across the denominational divides for about the past fifty years, has been a disaster.

What commenced in Locke gained momentum throughout the modern period. One thinks of the move in the nineteenth century, so abhorred by John Henry Newman, to exclude religion from the circle of academic disciplines on the presumption that religion had to do with private and subjective matters.

assumption is the even more fundamental conviction that religion is finally irrational, a matter of complexes and fantasies rather than reason.

Argument is the way to turn even fierce opponents into allies.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has maintained that the contemporary regime of tolerance has its roots in the ideological and political settlements that followed the devastating wars of religion in the aftermath of the Reformation. Because Protestants and Catholics couldn’t adjudicate their disputes about doctrine, religious practice, and authority

the hyper-valorization of tolerance has proven to be a major block to constructive argument about religious matters. For in our postmodern society, toleration of religion typically goes hand in hand with the radical privatization of religion, the relegating of faith to the arena of interiority and its practice to the level of a hobby.