Culture Warrior Ross Douthat, columnist at the New York Times, opines on the coming religious war:
But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.
Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.
Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.
The riots reference is silly and self-congratulatory, but "the Western way of reason" as an exclusive European notion betrays and ignorance of both the notions of "western" and "reason."
Douthat at least, as a graduate of college, ought to know there would be precious little Western way of reason worth giving a crap about without, for instance, Averroe–che il gran commento feo.
So it's compatible, to say the least–one wonders, however, about whether Douthat's militant Christianity is.
