Harvey Cox and the Secular-Religious Divide

One of the core assumptions I bring to my work on campus is that we are entering a new moment in American society. Simply put, people today are hungry for a way to be intellectually honest and still use the language of belief. As a culture, we have come to sense that the insistent secularism of the last generation, while it brought much good, also threw out the baby with the bathwater. There has to be a way to be a smart person who recognizes and believes in science and reason, but who can still have faith in religious traditions and have a relationship with God (albeit a more sophisticated version of the Creator than was perhaps articulated in previous, more authoritarian, generations). As one student so marvelously put it to me a couple of years ago, "We're looking for coherence without codependence." The Democrats are talking about God, for crying out loud; and there's no question in my mind that this is a major part of the appeal of Barack Obama (see a previous post).

On her radio program "Speaking of Faith" this morning, Krista Tippet interviewed Harvard Prof. Harvey Cox. The title of the program is "Beyond the Atheism-Religion Divide," and it's fantastic. Cox offers a wonderful, sensible counterpoint to the strident anti-religion rhetoric of Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, on the one hand, and the strident, anti-modernist fundamentalism of the religious right (and others). Highly recommended.