While I was in Chicago for the Christmas break, I had a wonderful meeting with around thirty young Jesuits. They were massively impressive people: smart, articulate, passionate about their work, and dedicated to the Gospel. Toward the end of our time together, one of the men posed a question that, he warned, would “put me on the spot”—and the discussion then became especially lively and illuminating.

During this Christmas holiday, I’ve been reading Anthony Gottlieb’s breezy and enjoyable history of modern philosophy, entitled “The Dream of Enlightenment.” I found his chapter on Spinoza extremely clarifying and indeed useful as a foil for what I take to be a properly religious view of things. Answering him point by point is a good exercise for anyone who would aspire to evangelize the culture today.

Over the Christmas break, I spent a fair amount of time binge-watching Jordan Peterson videos. Of the many Peterson videos, the ones that intrigued me the most featured his dialogues with Sam Harris, one of the “four horsemen of the new atheism” and perhaps the most strident critic of religion on the scene today.