Thomas Banchoff - Professor Thomas Banchoff is director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and Associate Professor in the Government Department and the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.
Banchoff is editor of Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2007), Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), and Religion and the Global Politics of Human Rights, co-edited with Robert Wuthnow (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). He is also working on a manuscript on the religious and secular politics of stem cell research in Europe and the United States.
Two of Banchoff's previous books explored the intersection of history, institutions, and values in European politics. The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995 (University of Michigan Press, 1999) examined Germany's enduring turn towards a peaceful, multilateral, foreign policy, and Legitimacy and the European Union: The Contested Polity, co-edited with Mitchell Smith (Routledge, 1999), analyzed problems of political representation and identitification beyond the level of nation state.
Professor Banchoff received his BA from Yale (summa cum laude) in 1986, an MA from the University of Bonn in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton in 1993. He was a Conant fellow at Harvard's Center for European Studies in 1997-98 and a Humboldt Fellow at the Centre for European Integration Studies in Bonn in 2000-01. Banchoff was awarded the DAAD Award for Distinguished Scholarship in German studies in 2003.
Michael Cromartie - Michael Cromartie is Vice President at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and he directs both the Evangelicals in Civic Life and Religion & the Media programs.
On September 20, 2004, Mr. Cromartie was appointed by President George W. Bush to a two-year term on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. On July 1, 2005, he was elected chairman of the commission.
He is also a senior advisor to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and a senior fellow with The Trinity Forum.
He is the host of Radio America's weekly show Faith and Life; an adjunct professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary; and an advisory editor of Christianity Today. He is also on the Board of Directors of Mars Hill Audio, and served as an advisor to the PBS documentary series With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Christian Right in America.
Mr. Cromartie has contributed book reviews and articles to First Things, Books and Culture, Crisis, the Washington Times, The Reformed Journal, Insight, Christianity Today, Stewardship Journal, World, and The Presbyterian Journal.
He is the co-editor, with Richard John Neuhaus, of Piety and Politics: Evangelicals and Fundamentalists Confront the World (1987; now in its fifth printing). Eternity magazine named Piety and Politics one of the twenty-five best books of 1988.
Christopher Hitchens - Christopher Hitchens is an author, journalist and literary critic. Now living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Nation and Slate; additionally, he is an occasional contributor to many other publications.
Alister McGrath - Alister McGrath is a biochemist and Christian theologian born in Belfast, North Ireland. He currently enjoys the title of distinction "Professor of Historical Theology" granted by the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on history and theology, including In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (2001), and The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (2005).
He has written biographies of John Calvin, Thomas Torrance, and J. I. Packer. He has also written on the interaction of science and theology and his A Scientific Theology (4 volumes, 2001-2004) has been hailed as one the most important works of systematic theology to appear in recent years. He has written two critiques of the biologist Richard Dawkins: The Dawkins Delusion? (2007) and Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (2005). His most recent book is Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution - A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First, published by HarperOne. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2005 and in 2009 he will give the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen.
Poison or Cure? Religious Belief in the Modern World
A debate, dialogue, and discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University host a debate between writer Christopher Hitchens and Oxford University professor Alister McGrath on the role of religious belief in the modern world.
The "atheism debate" was the ultimate intellectual sideshow right after Alan Watts when I was a student. Hitchens draws adherents by simply engaging the audience. McGraths' discipline doesn't surprise me as he is as plodding in his speech as any Anglican on the pulpit. I've heard McGrath debate Dawkins as well and the effect was the same. It's a shame that McGrath is such a terrible public speaker. They might actually have had some intelligent discourse.
Professor Hitchens is the remedy for the disease of Judeo-Christian religion
Bravo to Prof. Hitchens, and his eminently sensible grandiloquence in stating the case for rationality over superstition. His place among 21st Century giants in philosophy is assured.
A great debate, I truly love Fora.tv for making all of these debates available, its great to turn one on while working around the house and just to listen to the intelligent debate from both sides. Intelligent debate is truly an art and it thrills beyond words. I personally feel that Hitchens had the upper hand through much of the debate, McGrath, while obviously an intelligent and civil person was a bit too reluctant to assert his beliefs I feel. If he had been a bit more coercive perhaps Hitchens wouldn't have been able to steer the conversation so much, as an athiest myself I'll end with a long live Christopher Hitchens.
In any Q&A about religion versus reason that raises the question "WHY?" we need to look to science for the explanation, rather than religion. For example why do we have any obligation to each other? A rational atheist will turn to science for an answer - psychology, evolution, sociology, etc. Turning to religion to answer the question "why?" resorts to divine revelation based on ignorance and mere guesswork. Science is systematic and based on logic that can be tested, etc. Divine revelation of religion is merely a cultural belief passed on through the generations based on a non scientific attempt to discover so called truth.
Hitchens is peerless and correct.
His assertion that man invented god in his own image jibes with what I know. This debate made clear Hitchens is on solid ground, makes sense and refutes nonsense posing as faith in his inimitable fashion which provokes
thought and earns agreement
