Fractionals

I'm halfway done, but this troubled me:

Arendt's corpus exhibits an overall lack of architectural integrity, and its basic flaw is the notion that worldliness can survive without faith in divinity. Like many modern intellectuals, Arendt thought that religious insights could subsist without their roots in theology, and the result, in her case, was a panoramic oeuvre of portentous incoherence.

I'll grant him the first point (Origins of Totalitarianism is organized in a rather slovenly manner), but I don't see how he can couch a critique of form in a faith-vs-faithlessness binarity; and, most ominously, conclude that an intellectual system without theology dissolves into incoherence.

Point taken on where he puts in the faith/non-faith binarity (I hadn't noticed that, and that does strike me as troubling/wrong), but as for his conclusion:

I disagree with him, naturally, and think it'd be nice if he'd fully unpacked the implications of that, or even argued it fully, but dude is writing in Christianity Today, and I don't really expect stuff there to explain to its readers over and over again that they believe "an intellectual system without theology dissolves into incoherence" any more than I really expect Hitchens to make a reasoned, coherent argument every time he attacks religion - or rather, I don't expect Hitchens to have to keep making the same argument over and over again every time he wants to take a poke at the Pope; unless practically every article on CT wants to take the argument that intellectual systems that try to take God out of morality (I'm not so sure they'd make this argument for any intellectual system) will collapse as their main point, in which case they'd be treading water, at some point they just have to treat that as a given.

Or to put it another way, I don't see him arguing for the existence of God, either; it's just assumed to be as one of his biases.

Also note that he says "Arendt thought that religious insights could subsist without their roots in theology"; I get the sense if she wasn't dragging Augustine into it he'd be taking this somewhere else. In any case, I think there's still a lot of good stuff here, even if I do disagree with him on this point.

The subtext to this essay seems to be, "The poor old dear, using Christians like Augustine in a secular context." As if atheists couldn't lead Christian lives.

Hey, we're absolutely in agreement on that - my only point is I don't really expect him to take time out of the essay to make the argument that is going to be taken as a given for most of his audience.

And that subtext aside, I did think it was a pretty admirable piece of work. But then again I say the same thing of comparable work by fire-breathing atheists.