I’ve always thought highly of Christopher Hitchens even when I’ve disagreed with him. As he deals with his own mortality, I now find him not only brilliant and witty, I find him inspirational. In this interview broadcast the other night on Australian TV, Hitchens discusses living (and perhaps dying) with cancer and his evolution as a thinker. Even with death lurking over his shoulder, Hitchens displays an amazing clarity of mind and fearlessness - a warrior.
 

 
Pot-stirrer par excellence—and Mother Teresa foe—Christopher Hitchens, has a new memoir out.  For a man who seems to embrace his fair share of contradictory impulses, it’s titled, fittingly, Hitch-22, and just received a heap of praise in today’s New York Times:

Anyone who’s closely read Mr. Hitchens’s work—including his best-selling manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything—or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent’s arguments with a flick of the wrist.  He holds dear the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards.  His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew.  Mr. Hitchens is devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes (though he has recently quit smoking) and long nights spent talking.

Vanity Fair’s carrying a lengthy excerpt from Hitch-22.  In it, Hitchens recounts his friendship with Martin Amis and describes a typically cryptic telephone encounter with Thomas Pynchon.  And for a look at what topics might pop up during a long night with Hitchens, here’s a clip that touches on 22 of ‘em:

 
Bonus: Hitchens discusses Hitch-22 on ABC radio Part I, Part II

Excellent clip of Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher taking a welding torch to the Catholic Church’s current policy on dealing with molester priests.

The Catholic Church is in serious trouble and may have nowhere to run, depending on who you ask.

“I warned them about all of this,” declared author Christopher Hitchens, appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night. “Nothing good can come of a church that has as its’ slogan, ‘Leave no child’s behind.’ And then they went and chose as pope the man who was personally responsible, in his dioceses, and institutionally responsible for the cover-up. So now, there’s no escape.”

The child rape scandals that have savaged Catholic ranks for years starting in the United States, then flaring up in Ireland, Germany, Italy and other locations around the world, have finally come to implicate Pope Benedict XVI, according to recent reports.

At time of this writing, the most recent scandal flare-up involved a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, where up to 200 boys were molested by a man whom Hitchens said “was allowed to walk free and was buried with full honors as a priest.”

(Raw Story: Christopher Hitchens vs. Pope)

(Christopher Hitchens: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

 
Wonderful short essay from Christopher Hitchens, writing about British novelist J.G. Ballard on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

From The Atlantic:

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively ?

Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry absolutely scathingly slammed the sins of the Church at the Intelligence?Ǭ? talks. See resources below.

Here’s a good discussion thread about the talk.

And here’s the whole conference, via Richard Dawkins.

(Previously on Dangerous Minds: Canonizing Sinead O’Connor, Catholic Church Covered up Child Sexual Abuse for 30 Years.)

 
Pot-stirring, hell, pot-smashing, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice) muses in Slate this week on what he’s “learned from debating religious people around the world.”  Typical for Hitchens, “Faith No More” is a nice balance of lucidity and venom.  But it’s also gracious to his current sparring partner, Pastor Douglas Wilson, a senior fellow at New St. Andrew’s College:

Wilson isn’t one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just “metaphors.”  He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God.  He doesn’t waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering?