A few days back I read somewhere that Thomas Jefferson was a lousy public speaker. Interesting, but kind of beside the point, I thought. I've had something of the same reaction to the news that Mother Teresa often felt cut off from God. Yes, I know there's gain in discussing doubt as an essential to faith. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, speaking in Calcutta (interestingly) in 1968, perhaps said it definitively when he stated that a person of faith who suffered no doubt could not possibly be a person of faith.

Mother Teresa's letters do nothing to diminish her status as a social entrepreneur whose vision focused on helping people despised for the disease and poverty. Coming from Albania (maybe the most obscure nation in Europe), she built a worldwide organization that attracted an awful lot of people who dedicated themselves full- or part-time to helping utter outcasts achieve a measure of dignity in their living and dying.

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Christopher Hitchens can be entertaining; that's apparent in his work. But the statement above is a rant: you either agree with it absolutely 100 percent or you don't. There's no room for conversation here, no space for dialogue, no opportunity for mutual discovery, for actual learning. And that's the stuff that causes us to engage intellectually, you might say makes us fully human.

Hitchens' statement is fully protected by the First Amendment. He's got every right to declare his opinion. So does the guy wearing the "Yankees Suck" t-shirt. The law, fortunately, doesn't compel anyone to respond to either. What's there to say, beyond unimaginative exclamations, like "Yeah!" or "Says you!" We get enough of that shout-you-down stuff in the stadiums... but there, at least you can get a beer and a hot dog.