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"Ancient of Days" by William Blake,
from Europe a Prophecy, 1794 |
Once upon a time I taught in a (more or less) Catholic high school. Occasionally I was called upon to teach religion to the bright-eyed young men and women of the 9th grade. At the time the so-called "New Atheists" (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, etc.) were in vogue, and so class usually contained two or three students eager to try out the latest anti-Christian tropes that they had picked up online or wherever it is that aspiring atheist proselytizers hang out. Needless to say, we had many a lively discussion. A number of these discussions became blog posts.
In the course of these conversations I became aware just how much our educational system and our cultural institutions have become imbued with an unspoken materialist orientation. Virtually all my students, even professed Christians, seemed to take it for granted that a transcendent God who cannot be measured or detected with scientific instruments could not be shown to exist . . .
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