Hitchens interviews for Portland (last)Monthly

I'm a bit late on bringing this to you. Perhaps you've already noticed (like I did while standing in line at Freddie's) that Portland Monthly recently interviewed Christopher Hitchens. I meant to let you know sooner, just like I meant to let you know about Hitchen's appearance at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall early last month. What can I say, I'll try and do better.

This isn't the nightly news, after all. That is, you won't catch me saying "Depend on me!" or "These are the stories that matter to you!" No, despite the confidence you may have instilled in me, reading this blog will not help keep your family safe (actually, that's debatable), or give you any guiding light to follow.

If you miss an entry—or even if you don't, apparently—the worst that will happen is you miss Christopher Hitchens when he comes to town—which, mind you, I view to be a stinging consequences of my neglect.

Christopher Hitchens is a name which I would like to begin to take for granted on this forum. That is, it no longer feels natural to supply him with any sort of introduction. Suffice it to say, he's the best public defender of atheism that I've observed, and has done much to combat the intractable and cumbersome meme of Religion in an age that, until recently (thanks to Hitchen's and other outspoken atheists), had become much too accommodating.

The interview—billed by Portland Monthly as "an encounter more befitting the Rose City: a conversation with a liberal believer..."—aimed to pair Hitchens not with yet another fundamentalist Christian (a format that I imagine becomes tiring), but instead with a retired minister from one of the more evolved tentacles of the Christian faith—the First Unitarian Church of Portland.

Too say that it's evolved is simply to say that it has followed the trend of becoming increasingly watered down. Interviewer and former church minister, Marilyn Sewell, while seeming like a cool enough lady—and clearly one who has pressed up against the boundaries of faiths constraints—in turn represents the vague and vaporous future of religion as it evolves into nothing in particular.

Listen to the full interview at PortlandMonthly.com