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You describe in your book a debate between Monsignor Knox and Arnold Lunn, where they discuss who deserves eternal damnation.

Lunn's question was:

You had a sexual night out and you wake up the next morning with a heart attack, and you don't have an opportunity to be contrite, does that mean you go to hell? To which Knox said, "God's not going to send anybody to hell who doesn't belong there." And that answer had a miraculous effect on Lunn's skepticism.

You have some very moving pages about your mother and the naturalness of her relationship with God. You say, "Her worship of Him was as intense as that of a saint transfixed. And His companionship was as that of an old and very dear friend." And then you say about her that she had the "habit of seeing the best in everyone" and "a humorous spark in her eye." And she never broke her rule of "never, ever to complain, because, she explained, she could never repay God the favors He had done her, no matter what tribulations she might be made to suffer." She had a great influence on you, too.

Well, she did. She had a great influence on all her children. She was a devoted mother and a superb human being. There is a sense in which one has to resist the temptation to assign a uniqueness to her. Which we nevertheless thought was hers.

So both your parents had a great influence on your own faith, both your father's devotion and your mother's godly example?

Yes, they did. My father was never in any sense ostentatious about his faith. But, as I think I explain somewhere in the book, if I stumbled into his bedroom just before he left in the morning for wherever he was going, one would find him on his knees praying.

You say in your book, "There is something about the modern disposition that compels even those who believe in Him to keep all such matters tidily secluded in one's own tent. I am one of many millions who attend church on Sundays, receive the sacrament, say every day a prayer, particularly when a friend is ailing or gone; and yet I shrink from any religious communication that could possibly be thought intrusive." Now why is this? Is this temperamental, or does it say something about the modern disposition?

I think it's the culture. I think I mention in the book that all of Ephesus rejoiced when word came in after a church council that they affirmed the Homoousian view of Christ. That kind of thing doesn't happen anymore. But then I am, by nature, indisposed to bring up religious matters uninvited. I just don't do it. For that reason, I won't turn to someone, as Bishop Fulton Sheen did to the skeptical journalist Heywood Broun. Sheen phoned Broun and Broun said, "What are you calling me about?" And Sheen said, "Your immortal soul." It was very providential, because years later Broun became a Christian. But I don't have that kind of evangelistic skill or inclination.

Yet you admire it in others. You talk about going to a prison with Charles Colson and hearing him preach.

That's different, because Charles Colson is a missionary, and he accepts the mandate of public instruction.

But there is something about the effect of secularization that creates in the modern disposition a difficulty about discussing things that are theological and transcendent in nature.

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February (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52