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Thank you for your patience while we collect our thoughts to prepare an essay on this topic. While you wait, here is a sneak preview of reference material that will be incorporated into the coming essay: Craig Gay's The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist is published by Eerdmans. Gay acknowledges his debt to sociologist Peter Berger, who has written a great deal about the effects of modernity on religious conviction. Making Sense of Modern Times: Peter L. Berger and the Vision of Interpretative Sociology, edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), contains a number of essays summarizing Berger's thinking about social theory, modernization, and the "problem" of religion in the modern world. Berger's The Precarious Vision (Doubleday, 1961) is one of the earliest works in which Berger describes why it is difficult for a fully contemporary person to maintain a Christian view of reality that is not in some way precarious. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Doubleday, 1967), includes discussion of the process of secularization and of how secularization affects the plausibility of religious truth claims. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (co-written by Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner; Random House, 1973) contains some discussion of the devastating effects of uncertainty brought about by modern social structures. In The Heretical Imperative (Anchor Press, 1979), Berger describes modernity as "a near-inconceivable expansion of the area of human life open to choices." In such a context, what are the challenges to religious belief and practice? Finally, one of Berger's more recent collections of thoughts on these matters is A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (Free Press, 1992). [Posted November 2001, ALG]
With enemies like this . . .
The spurt of books published in the past few years by fervent, fundamentalist atheists has seen a predictable sequel in a crop of titles by the critics of the critics of religion. The most stimulating of these critiques may have been written by a man who makes no claims of personal Christian commitment. . . .
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Paul Vitz, on Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-042.2.3
Craig Gay, on how modern culture encourages atheism (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-038.1.1
D. Bruce Lockerbie, on the struggle of many modern writers against religion (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-037.1.3
A. N. Wilson, on how writing the biography of C. S. Lewis led him to renounce belief in Christianity (MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, ) MHT-002.2.1
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