Maggie's Farm

Heather MacDonald, the superb essayist for City Journal, discussed her agnosticism the other day in The American Conservative, and for reasons I do not understand, she caught some flak. From a piece by Michael Novak at NRO:

Heather Mac Donald is perfectly right to demand of Christianity the open display of its truth claims, and to ask that its evidence for these claims be placed on the table, as she has recently in a piece in The American Conservative and in a thread on NRO?s "The Corner." Christians have tried to follow that path since the writings of the earliest centuries ? Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, St. Augustine, and legions of others.

Christians were a persecuted minority for three centuries. They did not overcome the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, by force, but by argument, and not from outside but from within. As a competing horizon, way of life, and intellectual articulation, Christianity better explained many more realities and paradoxes of human life than any preceding civilization. It conquered the world both by argument and by personal example.

Mac Donald is right to demand as much.

Whole thing here.?(h/t, Smart Christian)