A couple of interesting paragraphs from a NYTimes Magazine article by a former Catholic (in his youth), former evangelical (in his older youth) and, here observer of the recent Billy Graham Crusade in NYC.

But the thirst for knowledge isn’t limited to those who attend the right schools. (Nor, I was to learn, is it universal among them.) The caricature of American evangelicals as incurious and indifferent to learning is false. Visit any Christian bookstore and you will see that they are gluttons for learning – of a certain kind. They belong to Bible-study groups; they buy works of scriptural interpretation; they sit through tedious courses on cassette, CD or DVD; they take notes during sermons and highlight passages in their Bibles. If anything, it is their thirst for knowledge that undoes them. Like so many Americans, they know little about history, science, secular literature or, unless they are immigrants, foreign cultures. Yet their thirst for answers to the most urgent moral and existential questions is overwhelming. So they grab for the only glass in the room: God’s revealed Word.

A half-century ago, an American Christian seeking assistance could have turned to the popularizing works of serious religious thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, John Courtney Murray, Thomas Merton, Jacques Maritain and even Martin Buber and Will Herberg. Those writers were steeped in philosophy and the theological traditions of their faiths, which they brought to bear on the vital spiritual concerns of ordinary believers – ethics, death, prayer, doubt and despair. But intellectual figures like these have disappeared from the American landscape and have been replaced by half-educated evangelical gurus who either publish vacant, cheery self-help books or are politically motivated. If an evangelical wants to satisfy his taste for truth today, it’s strictly self-service.

I am not sure that evangelicals a half-century ago were reading Maritain, myself. I think this section is a bit garbled. If anything, the intellectual offerings specifically for an evangelical audience are probably of more depth and breadth a half-century ago.

(It’s an okay article, typical of one who’s Past All That, but with an interesting little paragraph on his brief foray into the Word of God Community (Catholic charismtatic) in Ann Arbor.

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