The Catholic Church has not been silent on the issue. In 2003, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace released a document, titled Water, An Essential Element For Life, that has been updated three times: in 2006, again in 2009, and then just this month. In the original document, the Council “expressed its hope of a formal recognition of the right to drinking water; and this as a fundamental, inalienable human right based on human dignity.” This call was echoed in 2006, when the Council wrote that

Water is much more than just a basic human need. It is an essential, irreplaceable element to ensuring the continuance of life. Water is intrinsically linked to fundamental human rights such as the right to life, to food and to health. Access to safe water is a basic human right. In a Message to the Bishops of Brazil in 2004, Pope John Paul II wrote, “as a gift from God, water is a vital element essential to survival, thus everyone has a right to it”.

A human right is generally protected by internationally guaranteed standards that ensure fundamental freedoms for individuals and communities. It principally concerns the relationship between the individual and the State. In this regard, governmental obligations vis-à-vis the right can be broadly categorized as: to respect it, protect it and fulfill it.

The 2006 update to Water, An Essential Element For Life also ”expressed the hope that a culture would be promoted to value, respect and consider water not as a commodity but a good destined for everyone.” In the 2012 update, the Council notes that along with the principle of solidarity and subsidiarity, a sense of urgency must now emerge, noting that “Today – amidst a violent economic crisis also linked to the irresponsible exploitation of natural resources, the unhinging of finance from the real economy and of profit from sustainability – it is time to make an assessment of the current urgent situation and to outline effective solutions for the problems left open.”

What is needed, says the Council, is a set of networked governing institutions that “will guarantee everyone everywhere a regular and sufficient access to water.” Important tasks for those institutions include fostering scientific cooperation and the transfer of technology, promoting managerial and administrative cooperation, developing measures to protect against corruption and pollution, and the creation of effective subsidiary authorities at the regional and cross-border level.

Finally, the Council reiterates,

Humanity received the mission from God to take care of and administer the environment, water and the other resources wisely, which are “common goods” and, as such, contribute to the “world common good” for whose realization suitable institutions are essential. These institutions should take it upon themselves to guarantee the universal destination of goods on the global level. In fact, the social doctrine of the Church bases the ethics of property relations regarding the goods of the earth on the biblical perspective which indicates the creation as a gift of God to all human beings: “God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should be in abundance for all in like manner. Whatever the forms of property may be, as adapted to the legitimate institutions of peoples, according to diverse and changeable circumstances, attention must always be paid to this universal destination of earthly goods. In using them, therefore, man should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others”.

The right to use earthly goods, including the use of water, is a natural, inviolable right with universal value because it is due to every human being. It must be protected and made effective through appropriate laws and institutions.

Jesus said to Nicodemus:
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light,
because their works were evil.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light
and does not come toward the light,
so that his works might not be exposed.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.

John 3:14-21

According to Rene Girard, human desire is mimetic. We “catch” or borrow our desires from other people. Desire is also triangular, because it involves not just the formal object of desire – a new car, a job, prestige – but the person who models the desire for us. Within this triangular relationship, the object is merely an instrument that mediates our true desire. And what is that true desire? Girard says that all desire is a desire to be. We don’t really desire to have something, but to be someone, and that someone is the model, the one who has shown us what to desire.

As this mimetic relationship between subject and model is reciprocated, replicated, and intensified, it degenerates into a miasma of rivalry and destructive forms of idolatry. According to Girard, this psychological dynamic is at the heart of all human violence, and the sinful human solution to this drama, the generative mimetic scapegoating mechanism, is at the heart of all archaic religion and culture. It is generative because it creates renewed social solidarity and a sense of personal and collective righteousness. It is scapegoating because its random and structurally innocent victims become the repositories of the community’s sinful rivalries and violence. 

The scapegoating mechanism is the “sin of the world,” according to Girard, and it is best summed up by the high priest Caiaphas: “It is better for you that one man should die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” Caiaphas intended for the cross of Christ to be just another in a long line of victim-events, a sop for the maddening crowd. But the divine mission of Jesus is to break the power and efficacy of the scapegoating mechanism, to take away the sin of the world. He accomplishes this by his teaching, his demonstration of divine power, his utterly compelling personality, and his obvious and absolute innocence on the cross. So convincing are all of these that even the Roman centurion at the foot of the cross is heard to exclaim, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

Okay, on to today’s Gospel. Anyone who watches American sports is familiar with those ubiquitous, home-made signs that read “JOHN 3:16.” The idea is that this verse is a kind of capsule depiction of salvation history. That view is especially popular among Evangelicals, who often combine John 3:16 with John 3:7 (“You must be born again”) into a little formulaic bundle, a sort of Gospel in a nutshell.

That’s one way of thinking about this text, and I won’t quibble with it. But I would like to propose another. I suggest that the most important verses in today’s Gospel reading are the ones that immediately precede John 3:16: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” This is one of three passages in John in which Jesus refers to being “lifted up.” In John 12, he says, “Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this worldwill be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”

I’d like to suggest that in today’s Gospel Jesus is calling on us to adopt him as our model, as the true object of our desire. To shed all the sinful desires, false models and resulting rivalries and idolatries that keep us condemned to repeat the darkness of the mimetic contagion. From the beginning of his ministry, Jesus went out of his way to call attention to his person and encourage the kind of mimetic hero worship he knows is built into us. His first disciples ask, “Where do you abide?” He answers, “Come and see,” only to reveal that he is the one who abides in the will of his Father. And he invites them (and us) to “Abide in me.” He identifies himself as the “way, the truth and the life.” He says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Again and again, Jesus calls us into a mimetic relationship with himself, even conditioning eternal life on it.

On the cross, Christ was indeed lifted up, attracting the eye of the whole human race, drawing all men and women to himself “so that everyone who believes … may have eternal life.” I would suggest that to “believe” in Christ is not merely to give intellectual assent to a set of propositional statements or creedal formulations.  No, saving belief in Christ is to take and hold him as our model, to desire nothing but him and his holiness, to appropriate his identity for ourselves: “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” This is how “the ruler of this world,” that “murderer from the beginning,” that “liar and the father of lies,” is driven out of our lives and out of our world. And if taking on the persona of Christ becomes difficult, St. Paul has the remedy: “Imitate me, even as I imitate Christ.” Through the saints we can imitate those who imitated those who imitated those who imitated Christ.

Thanks as always to my friend Gil Bailie, another of Rene Girard’s most important interpreters, for loaning me his insights.

Yesterday on the bus to San Diego two older men were talking about the President, and loud enough for everyone in the bus to hear. They called him a yellow coward, with the heart of a louse, a maniac on the verge of total insanity. They talked of their investments and losses. They talked of public utilities. And every other minute they cursed him. Each mention of wages, public works, unions, led to increased bitterness.

“There’ll be bloodshed yet,” they concluded, and grimly added that they’d like to take part in it. Hate was etched into the bitter lines of their faces and into their voices.

I could not help comparing their attitude with that of the two hundred or so unemployed I had talked to the day before in Los Angeles at an open Forum of the Workers’ Alliance. I talked of Christ the Worker, of a philosophy of labor, of the farming commune as a solution of unemployment. I told them of Peter [Maurin], and his social program for the lay apostolate.

The men I talked to wanted work, not a dole. They wanted private property (the idea of homesteads and community farm combined appealed to them). They wanted peace and brotherhood. They were interested in government help but would rather have work, provided it meant something to them–was building for their security and future. They were interested in a constructive program, not in fighting a class war. And when I thought how betrayed they are by their intellectual leadership, my heart wept.

It was enough to make one weep just to hear those two men talking on the bus. I thought of Peter Maurin and how he loves to indoctrinate wherever he goes, talking on street corners and buses and restaurants, wherever he happens to be. But his is a conservative indoctrination, and not a message of hate.

But in an interesting twist, the column winds up as a long encomium to John Courtney Murray, the liberal Jesuit priest and political theorist whose accomplishment was to, in Weigel’s words, “midwife a new Catholic understanding of the modern state and of the democratic project, which eventually reshaped the thinking and practices of the entire Church. ” As Weigel notes, it is John Courtney Murray who is often credited with providing the intellectual inspiration for the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae).

What is strange is that John Courtney Murray is also credited as having provided the intellectual firepower for a far less well-known “council” known as the Hyannisport Conclave. In a January 2009 Wall Street Journal article (How Support For Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma), Weigel’s National Review colleage, Anne Hendershott, sketched the origin and outcome of the Hyannisport Conclave:

At a meeting at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Mass., on a hot summer day in 1964, the Kennedy family and its advisers and allies were coached by leading theologians and Catholic college professors on how to accept and promote abortion with a “clear conscience.”

The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting in his book “The Birth of Bioethics” (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev. Joseph Fuchs, a Catholic moral theologian; the Rev. Robert Drinan, then dean of Boston College Law School; and three academic theologians, the Revs. Giles Milhaven, Richard McCormick and Charles Curran, to enable the Kennedy family to redefine support for abortion.

Mr. Jonsen writes that the Hyannisport colloquium was influenced by the position of another Jesuit, the Rev. John Courtney Murray, a position that “distinguished between the moral aspects of an issue and the feasibility of enacting legislation about that issue.” It was the consensus at the Hyannisport conclave that Catholic politicians “might tolerate legislation that would permit abortion under certain circumstances if political efforts to repress this moral error led to greater perils to social peace and order.”"

What we might call the “Murray Principle” was crystallized by Father John himself in a memo to Boston’s Cardinal Spellman in 1965. Spellman had asked Murray for an opinion on the proposed decriminalization of contraception in Massachusetts. In his memo, Murray wrote, “It is not the function of civil law to prescribe everything that is morally right and to forbid everything that is morally wrong. By reason of its nature and purpose, as the instrument of order in society, the scope of law is limited to the maintenance and protection of public morality. Matters of private morality lie beyond the scope of law; they are left to the personal conscience.”

As good modern liberals, Pelosi, Sibelius, and the others accept this principle on the pelvic issues. They may be “personally opposed” to abortion, but they also believe that in a religiously diverse polity like the United States, one in which there is widespread disagreement about these issues, it is best not to blur the line between the political/legislative and the moral/religious. George Weigel, who has written approvingly of John Courtney Murray’s “American Proposition” for decades, also accepts the Murray principle. A classical liberal, he just reserves its application for issues related t0 economics, and like his brethren on the left even counsels ignoring papal teaching when it suits him.

A year ago, George Weigel published an article in First Things titled “The End of the Bernardin Era: The Rise, Dominance, and Decline of a Culturally Accommodating Catholicism.” The irony of the title is that no one represents a culturally accommodating Catholicism more than George Weigel. His project has simply been to accommodate Catholicism to right-liberalism, including laissez-faire capitalism, Republican politics, and American empire. Perhaps someday, when Catholics in the United States have recovered from their infatuations with both strands of liberalism, someone will write an article titled “The End of the Weigel Era.”

The same is true with Lent, which is why simply passing through, with little substantial engagement, will never suffice for revelation or spiritual reward. A man may cross Death Valley in an air-conditioned SUV, but one can hardly say that he has really been there. In a similar way, a man may cross the Lenten landscape having hedged his pain and prayer – his engagement – only to emerge on the far side with the same confused priorities and muddled perceptions with which he entered. The Lord wants more for us than that.

The desert is mentioned explicitly only once in this Sunday’s readings, in the selection from Isaiah 43:

Thus says the LORD:
Remember not the events of the past,
the things of long ago consider not;
see, I am doing something new!
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
In the desert I make a way,
in the wasteland, rivers.

Jesus, our brother, waits for us in the desert. He has made a way into and through it for us. We will experience the burning sand of self-denial and the hot sun of self-donation. And we will fill up the vast, empty spaces with prayers of contrition, praise and supplication. But the Lord promises to do something new, for his people and for each of us individually. Expecting barrenness, we will find rivers of grace and new life in the Spirit.

I’ll conclude  this brief reflection with one of my favorite poems, titled “To The Desert,” by the Mexican-American poet and novelist Benjamin Alire Sáenz. With the poet, let our prayer this Lent be Sálvame, mi dios, trágame, mi tierra: Save me, my God! Consume me, my land.

I came to you one rainless August night.
You taught me how to live without the rain.
You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
You are sand, wind, sun, and burning sky,
The hottest blue. You blow a breeze and brand
Your breath into my mouth. You reach—then bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
I wake to you at dawn. Never break your
Knot. Reach, rise, blow, Sálvame, mi dios,
Trágame, mi tierra. Salva, traga, Break me,
I am bread. I will be the water for your thirst.

I accept and hold that principle, but I wonder if we’re really prepared to apply it across the board. The chart above, which was recently released by the Archdiocese of Chicago, shows the discretionary (non-entitlement and debt service) portion of the federal budget for Fiscal Year 2012. You will note that three-fifths of all federal discretionary spending is directed to the military. This money is used to pay for the salaries and benefits of uniformed personnel, civilian employees, and military retirees, as well as the purchase of new weapons systems, ongoing military operations, and so on.

But the fact is that there are a great many religious people in this country who are pacifist as a matter of religious conscience and practice. Many of them are members of the historic “peace churches” like the Mennonites, the Society of Friends (Quakers), Amish, or Church of the Brethren. Many others are members of mainline and Evangelical Protestant and Orthodox denominations. And there are many Catholics who have adopted pacifism, a choice the Church doesn’t command but certainly authenticates within her broader teaching on just war (CCC #2306 & #2311). And, of course, there are many non-Christians – Buddhists, Sikhs, and others – who have renounced war in all its forms for religious reasons.

My proposal is that these citizens be exempted from paying the percentage of their federal payroll and income taxes that would otherwise be used to support the Defense Department. In 2012, that would mean an exemption of roughly 60%. Now, I am aware that not everyone agrees with pacifism. In fact, I am not a pacifist,  and so I would not seek the exemption personally. But whether you or I might agree or not is really beside the point, just as it is beside the point in the current controversy over the contraception mandate. The principle being upheld is that as a matter of religious liberty no one ought to be forced to pay for something that violates their conscience. If that is true of government-mandated private insurance policies, and I believe it is, then it is equally true of government-mandated taxes. In fact, more so, because if a Catholic institution refuses to comply with the mandate, it will be charged $2,000 per employee; but if a pacifist, following his religious conscience, refuses to pay any portion of his taxes, government goons will show up at his house and drag him off to prison.

So, who’s with me? Who will stand up for the religious liberty these citizens?

Contrast Kirk’s definition of “conservative” with the claim of contemporary “conservative” Michael Ledeen, who trumpets the revolutionary “menace” of democratic capitalism, American-style: “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. Of all the myths that cloud our understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the revolutionary tradition.” (From War Against the Terror Masters)

What Catholic “conservatives” (I mean political conservatism, not theological orthodoxy) seem not to understand is that the revolutionary spirit Ledeen describes doesn’t spare religion or traditional morality.  It is capitalism – or at least the Anglo-American variant of the thing – that has bequeathed to us a mass consumer society in which everything from toothpaste and automobiles to marriage and the unborn are rendered mere objects of “choice.” The dictatorship of relativism that Benedict XVI has warned us about is fueled by the revolutionary logic of the creative destruction at the heart of capitalism. If not checked, this logic would scour history of any slower, deeper, more meaningful, less materially efficient force, including the Church. It is this logic that the developing world – including the deeply religious societies of the Middle East – is desperately trying to resist, with varying degrees of success. And it is this logic that Catholics are called to resist, as well. Not by becoming socialists, but by embracing the whole teaching of the Church.

Consider this interesting quote by columnist George Will. Writing about the 1980 presidential race, Will suggested a fundamental schizophrenia in the marriage of convenience between cultural and economic conservatives:  ”The Republican platform of 1980 stresses two themes that are not as harmonious as Republicans suppose. One is cultural conservatism. The other is capitalist dynamism. The latter dissolves the former. Capitalism undermines traditional social structures and values. Republicans see no connection between the cultural phenomena they deplore and the capitalist culture they promise to intensify.”

They still don’t.

“The Industrial Revolution seems to have been a response of mankind to the challenge of a swelling population: ‘Capitalism gave the world what it needed,’ Ludwig von Mises writes sturdily in his Human Action, ‘a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.’ But it turned the world inside out. Personal loyalties gave way to financial relationships. The wealthy man ceased to be magistrate and patron; he ceased to be neighbour to the poor man; he became a mass-man, very often, with no purpose in life by aggrandizement. He ceased to be conservative because because he did not understand conservative norms, which cannot be instilled by mere logic – a man must be steeped in them. The poor man ceased to feel that he had a decent place in the community; he became a social atom, starved for most emotions except envy and ennui, severed from true family-life and reduced to mere household-life, his old landmarks buried, his old faiths dissipated. Industrialism was a harder knock to conservativism than the books of the French egalitarians. To complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservativism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization, and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives. From this confusion, from the popular belief that Hamilton was the founder of American conservatvism, the forces of tradition in the United States have never fully escaped.”

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

“We live, as we must sooner or later recognize, in an era of sentimental economics and, consequently, of sentimental politics. Sentimental communism holds in effect that everybody and everything should suffer for the good of “the many” who, though miserable in the present, will be happy in the future for exactly the same reasons that they are miserable in the present. Sentimental capitalism is not so different from sentimental communism as the corporate and political powers claim. Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the “free market” and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to “the many” — in, of course, the future.

These forms of political economy may be described as sentimental because they depend absolutely upon a political faith for which there is no justification, and because they issue a cold check on the virtue of political and/or economic rulers. They seek, that is, to preserve the gullibility of the people by appealing to a fund of political virtue that does not exist.

Communism and ‘free-market’ capitalism both are modern versions of oligarchy. In their propaganda, both justify violent means by good ends, which always are put beyond reach by the violence of the means. The trick is to define the end vaguely “the greatest good of the greatest number” or “the benefit of the many” — and keep it at a distance.

The fraudulence of these oligarchic forms of economy is in their principle of displacing whatever good they recognize (as well as their debts) from the present to the future. Their success depends upon persuading people, first, that whatever they have now is no good, and, second, that the promised good is certain to be achieved in the future. This obviously contradicts the principle — common, I believe, to all the religious traditions — that if ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now; we are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future. And both communism and capitalism have found such principles to be a great embarrassment. If you are presently occupied in destroying every good thing in sight in order to do good in the future, it is inconvenient to have people saying things like ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ or ‘Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.’ Communists and capitalists alike, ‘liberal” capitalists and ‘conservative’ capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, “I’m doing this because I can’t do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable.’”

Wendell Berry

“If by capitalism is meant, not diffused ownership of property, but monopolistic capitalism in which capital bids for labor on a market, and concentrates wealth in the hands of the few, then from an economic point of view alone, the Church is just as much opposed to capitalism as it is to communism. Communism emphasizes social use to the exclusion of personal rights, and capitalism emphasizes personal rights to the exclusion of social use. The Church says both are wrong. It therefore refuses to maintain capitalism as an alternative to the economic side of communism…. Capitalistic economy is godless; communism makes economics God….”

Bishop Fulton Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West

“There is something wrong with a society that is governed entirely by the imperatives of business, which recognises no restraint on trade apart from the market, and which makes business and enterprise into its primary values. When Marx and Engels composed the Communist manifesto they did not condemn capitalism for its economic power. They condemned it for its human cost. ‘It has left no other nexus between man and man,’ they wrote, ‘than callous cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour … in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.’ Exaggerated, of course. But not without truth. Even if we dismiss Marx’s alternative as naive in its ends and wicked in its means, we should not dismiss the moral insight from which it derives – namely, that the free market left to itself is both a creative and a destructive force …”

Roger Scruton

The true conservative is the person who recognizes that his life is derived from and dependent on society. As members of society we only become the people we are through society’s power over us. No citizen is possessed of a natural right that transcends his obligation to be ruled.

Roger Scruton

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PK6w5lqe9A&h=420]

Phillip Blond, leader of the British “Red Tory” movement

Havel did not profess any specific religious creed, but his life and work were nevertheless infused with a deeply religious sensibility, and he feared the loss of transcendence, a detachment from “responsibility to the order of Being,” as the greatest danger facing mankind today:

We are living in the first truly global civilisation. That means that whatever comes into existence on its soil can very quickly and easily span the whole world.

But we are also living in the first atheistic civilization, in other words, a civilization that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important.

However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilization is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit …

… Wonder and an awareness that things are not self-evident are, I believe, the only way out of the dangerous world of a civilisation of pride.

Can anything be absolutely self-evident?

Wonder at the non-self-evidence of everything that creates our world is, after all, the first impulse to the question: what purpose does it all have? Why does it all exist? Why does anything exist at all? We don’t know and we will never find it out. It is quite possible that everything is here in order for us to have something to wonder at. And that we are here simply so that there is someone to wonder. But what is the point of having someone wonder at something? And what alternative is there to being? After all if there were nothing, there would also be no one to observe it. And if there were no one to observe it, then the big question is whether non-being would be at all possible …

… In all events, I am certain that our civilisation is heading for catastrophe unless present-day humankind comes to its senses. And it can only come to its senses if it grapples with its short-sightedness, its stupid conviction of its omniscience and its swollen pride, which have been so deeply anchored in its thinking and actions.

As do I. Obviously, I didn’t agree with Hitchens on much, especially his atheism and his perplexing defense of the war in Iraq. But in a country where the public discourse grows more stupid by the day – where stupidity is even counted as a qualification for high office in some quarters - Hitchens was a reminder that there is great value in intelligence, clear articulation and the honest search for truth. Hitchens found the claims of the Christian faith wanting, even perverse. But he took them seriously in a way even many Christians do not. He challenged Christians to defend the often contradictory practice of our faith, and to reconcile the seeming absurdity of its assumptions with the hard truths of the world around us. I never viewed Hitchens as an enemy of Christianity, but he was one of its most severe critics. And thank God for that. The honest critic is always a friend of those who seek the truth.

I’ll close with words that Hitchens would have found hopelessly irrational and even a bit demeaning when applied to him. I don’t care, and whether he or we were right about what happens at death, I’m confident he doesn’t care any longer either: “Eternal rest grant to him,  Lord. In your mercy, welcome Christopher and all those for whom you died into your peace.”