From First Things, an essay by David Hart so good I’m tempted to quote it whole (see also):

The prin­ci­pal source of my melancholy…is my firm con­vic­tion that today’s most obstreper­ous infi­dels lack the courage, moral intel­li­gence, and thought­ful­ness of their fore­fa­thers in faith­less­ness. What I find chiefly offen­sive about them is not that they are skep­tics or athe­ists; rather, it is that they are not skep­tics at all and have pur­chased their athe­ism cheaply, with the sort of boor­ish arro­gance that might make a man believe him­self a great strate­gist because his tanks over­whelmed a town of unarmed peas­ants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admis­sion to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s con­quests in advance, taking always the paths of least resis­tance, one can always imag­ine one­self a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one with­out a Water­loo, the other with­out the clap).

But how long can any soul delight in vic­to­ries of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banal­ity of the New Atheists—with, that is, their child­ishly Manichean view of his­tory, their lack of any tragic sense, their indif­fer­ence to the cul­tural con­tin­gency of moral “truths,” their wanton incu­rios­ity, their vague bab­blings about “reli­gion” in the abstract, and their absurd opti­mism regard­ing the future they long for?

I am not—honestly, I am not—simply being dis­mis­sive here. The utter incon­se­quen­tial­ity of con­tem­po­rary athe­ism is a social and spir­i­tual catastrophe.

…

The only really effec­tive anti­dote to the drea­ri­ness of read­ing the New Athe­ists, it seems to me, is reread­ing Niet­zsche.

…Read More…

I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to write a good long piece about the phe­nom­e­non that some have named the New Athe­ism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christo­pher Hitchens, Daniel Den­nett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the dis­ap­pear­ance of reli­gion as a cul­tural force. The arti­cle I wanted to read would have less to do with push­ing back against the argu­ments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phe­nom­e­non of their col­lec­tive appearance.

The most obvi­ous ques­tion that this imag­i­nary inquiry would tackle would be the ques­tion of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once?