I have only just started it, but I suspect I am going to enjoy David Bentley Hart's The Atheist Delusion: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.  If the "new atheists" have accomplished anything, it is to generate some wonderful and thoughtful Christian apologetical writing.  Part of what Hart wants to do, it seems, is highlight the cultural transformation that Christianity brought to the West (Rodney Stark's work comes to mind here).  Thus, Hart writes in the Introduction: "My chief ambition in writing [the book] is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting [i.e., the first five centures of the Christian era]: how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues" (XI).

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