The Eminently Sensible Ross Douthat

on Karen Armstrong.

He makes a fine point when he remarks that the early Fathers were dogmatic, but not Fundamentalist. Armstrong’s Episcopalianified squishiness attempts to preserve theism from the hostile onslaughts of Dawkins and Co by shrouding the whole thing in a fog of non-committal niceness and PC pieties. Douthat blows the fog away by noting that actual Catholic faith, while lithe and supple and ossified by the stupid categories of ideology, is nonetheless possessed of a definite skeletal structure (which is what allows it to be lithe and supple). The difference between Catholic faith and current ideologies is that ideologues on the Right want only the skeleton (dismissing everything else as touchy feely) and ideologues on the Left tend to want only the breath without haveing the body attached. Catholic faith offers us only the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ through the Church which is his body. Take it or leave it. But you can’t just have the bits you like.

{T]he Catholic faith has endured for 2,000 years because of Flannery O’Connors, not Karen Armstrongs. – Ross Douthat