Tony Jones.
I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday night, as I am wont to do, and there broke out a more-heated-than-usual argument between how two interlocuters, Michael Eric Dyson (requisite liberal) and Andrew Breitbart (requisite conservative). Then, as so often happens on that show, the panelists on the left side of your screen at home ganged up on the host on the right side. The topic that caused this unexpected alliance? God.
Maher is a flamboyent atheist, and he went nose-to-nose with Dyson on whether science requires faith—Maher says it doesn’t, Dyson says it does. Maher rested easier when Dyson was replaced across the table from him with secular-Jew-ango-atheist Sarah Silverman for the balance of the show.
The Maher-Dyson debate got me to thinking of the last time that I watched someone on Real Time make a thoughtful, reasoned defense of a thoughtful, reasoned faith in the face of Maher’s anti-religious vituperations. That person? Andrew Sullivan, the conservative uber-blogger, HIV-positive, Roman Catholic.
And I couldn’t help but think that 40 or 50 years ago, Maher’s sparring partner might have been an older Reinhold Neibuhr, or a young Harvey Cox. No more. Now we who are theologians proper have been supplanted by political pundits who occasionally rise to the defense of religion.
Last week, Jonathan L. Walton blogged here on RD about a conference that he and I recently attended at Claremont School of Theology. He mentioned my charge, to the collection of two score “progressive” theologians, that they be more savvy about how they market themselves.
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