The Queue: Reader's Block

I found myself making little progress through both Life of Christ & The Frozen Lighthouse; so, to get things moving again, I jumped The Rage against God by Peter Hitchens up from way down the queue.

The Rage against God was commissioned by Zondervan, the Grand Rapids-based publisher, in part as a response to Peter Hitchens's then-living brother (2010) Christopher Hitchens's far-famed atheist polemic, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. (I did not mourn Christopher Hitchens when he died in 2011, but I did pray for the repose of his soul.) I cannot judge The Rage against God as a counterpoint to God Is Not Great because I've not read the latter. However, as a believer I did not find The Rage against God particularly convincing, probably because, in Hitchens's own words:

I am neither a theologian nor even a Bible scholar. Nor am I a philosopher, nor a "public intellectual," whatever that may be. I don't think I am even an intellectual in private, just a jobbing newspaper scribbler who has spend more than thirty years in the University of Fleet Street.

The strongest part of The Rage against God is "Part 1: A Personal Journey through Atheism," the autobiographical portion; Part 1 is longer than Parts 2 & 3 combined, & could well have been, perhaps ought to have been expanded into a book all its own. The book's greatest weakness is that Hitchens leaves the impression, arguing as neither a theologian nor a Bible scholar, that the best reasons to believe in God are those advanced during the self-styled "Enlightenment": social cohension & public morality. Hitchens disdains the civic religion of twentieth century England (chapter five, "Britain's Pseudo-Religion and the Cult of Winston Churchill"), but what he principally offers is its place is the civic religion of seventeenth century England, the King James Bible & the Book of Common Prayer. Hitchens references his "robust English Protestantism" & conveys the definite impression that the central tenant of his faith is England. This impression is strengthened by a gratuitously Elizabethan swipe at the Spanish Inquisition:

Which has been the starting point of the secret policeman & the Inquisition merchant (see, I'm against the Spanish Inquisition, too, as any English schoolboy reared on tales of Drake & Raleigh & Grenville must be) down all the centuries.

Written as if the same "robust English Protestantism" which produced the King James Bible & the Book of Common Prayer hadn't financed its own secret policemen—replete with an Anglo-Scottish inquisition—by plundering the monasteries, & hadn't created the profession of priest-hunting, murdering Christians for the supposed crime of considering Jesus Christ the Head of the Church, rather than the reigning Tudor monarch.

Hitchens's most valuable contribution is taking to task the gravely compromised Christianity that fatally underminded its own moral authority by canonizing the horrors of the World Wars (1914-1918 & 1939-1945), a Christianity that prized patriotism over fidelity to the Gospel, but he undercuts his own case by pledging his allegiance to an equally egregiously comprised Christianity, twenty-first century Anglicanism.

Still, I made fairly quick work of The Rage against God, accomplishing the primary purpose of jump-starting my reading.

Recently
Edward Sri, No Greater Love: A Biblical Walk through Christ's Passion
Sam Guzman, The Catholic Gentleman: Living Authentic Manhood Today
Peter Hitchens, The Rage against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith

Currently
Lily Collins, Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me
Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ
M. K. Mace, The Frozen Lighthouse

Presently
Cy Kellett, Ad Limina
Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor Collection
Michael Gorn, N.A.S.A.: The Complete Illustrated History