Paul writes – I was recently listening to a fascinating interview on Speaking of Faith – Prof. Harvey Cox being interviewed by Krista Tippet. Here’s the “blurb” for the show – “In 1965, a young Harvard professor became the best-selling voice of secularism in America with his book The Secular City. He sees the old thinking in the "new atheism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The either/or debates between religion and atheism, he says, obscure the truly interesting interplay between faith and other forms of knowledge that is unfolding today.”
Reader: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does secularization have to do with religious proliferation and pluralism? The answer to both questions is the same. Athens and Jerusalem have created a whole history through their interaction with each other, and so have religion and secularization. In both cases, as soon as one achieves a kind of dominance, the other swoops back from exile to challenge it. When reason and intellect begin to ride high, they invariably make unrealistic claims. And faith and intuition awaken to question their hegemony. Then, just as the sacral begins to feel its oats and reach out for civilizational supremacy, reason and cognition question its pretentiousness. In past eras, this seesaw battle often took centuries. Today, events move more swiftly.”
Harvey Cox, from the foreword to Religion in the Secular City.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Krista Tippett: I think something that I found in your writing, that I've found very helpful in thinking about how this religion versus secularization debate is kind of cyclical. You, you talked about the linked dynamics of the poles of Athens and Jerusalem. When I read that, though, this pendulum is inside each of us, right? It's in the sweep of our lives, most of us.
Harvey Cox: Oh, yes.
Krista Tippett: And I think most of us hold these two places, these kinds of questions back and forth in some kind of truce or creative tension and don't find ourselves, don't recognize the utterly divided irreconcilable poles that these public debates then represent.
Harvey Cox: I think you're entirely right, that this is something that goes on inside all of us, I would say, even inside the most ardent fundamentalist, who, in the dark of night or early morning hours, might begin to doubt his or her utter and complete assurance about this or that, or the skeptic who, equally in the dark of night, begins to wonder whether his or her skepticism or agnosticism is really something he can live with.
I was over in Milan a few years ago as the guest of the cardinal, archbishop of Milan whose name is Martini. He's now moved to Jerusalem. He's a biblical scholar. You may recall; he was a candidate for the papacy. He got some votes before Benedict actually won.
Martini is a Jesuit. And he sponsors a lectureship in Milan every year called the Lectureship for Nonbelievers. And he introduced it, the year I was there, by saying, 'Look, when I say this is a lectureship for nonbelievers, it doesn't mean anything about all of you who are attending. Belief and non-belief run down through the middle of each of us, including myself, a cardinal of the church.' I thought; this is just terrific. This is a guy who's really making explicit what so many people feel and know about themselves, but are reluctant to talk about very often.”
You can download the interview as an Mp3 (or listen to it) by going here.
it's a great interview, i've just got turned on to speaking of faith and am really enjoying it...
Posted by: Paul | Monday, 12 November 2007 at 06:58 AM