Ross Douthat Quotes
I do think that evangelicals in general need to think seriously about how you pass on your faith across generations and over the long haul.
The Democratic Party's rigidly pro-choice stance is one of the more unyielding positions in contemporary American politics.
Every young writer, I imagine, has their first intellectual magazine, whose essays and articles are devoured all the more greedily for being slightly over one's head. Mine was First Things.
The thinking person's case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn't believe a word he says.
You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.
What replaces Christianity isn't going to be Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and so on. It's going to be something else and something secular people may not like very much.
If you're willing to recognize the religious element in one secular ideology, you need to be able to recognize it in your own.
The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.
Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.
I read a lot of G.K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.
The idea of a post-religious society is a fantasy, ultimately. Human beings are, by nature, religious in various ways.
Even secular people can't really escape from the need to rest their ideas on some belief, some sort of commitment that is not scientific commitment.
Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.
I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas.
Among the tastemakers and power brokers and intellectual agenda setters of late-twentieth-century America, orthodox Christianity was completely déclassé.
The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.
