by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

When Harry Met Nietzsche

     In current long-form journalism aboutreligion, the set-up passage (so often borne like a burden by the writer) doesn’t get any better than this:

If you gathered all the ex-Catholics in the United States, they would form the country’s second-largest religion, with nearly 23 million “members.” Only the Catholic Church itself is larger.
By comparison, the number of self-identified American atheists is small – less than 3% of the adult population. But that number has been inching upward, passing American Jews (2.2%) in the latest round of surveys.
I’ve been following that ascension for years, watching America’s “atheist awakening” burst forth from a few best-sellers to become a force with the potential to reshape the country’s culture, politics and spirituality.
But I am also interested in the small picture – less atheism as a mass movement and more the thoughts that flicker and burn through someone’s mind as he forsakes faith. As a man like Harry begins to bend toward atheism, what are the turning points, and what happens after the last corner is turned?
I talked to Harry for 10 months about those questions. And the more I asked, the more complex his answers became. I soon realized that Harry is not a typical atheist. He’s part of a bevy of former believers who, while trying to raise atheist children and create secular communities, are tapping an unlikely source: the religions they left behind.

It’s all there – nimbly, personably set out: Catholic exodus, atheist awakening, and the convergence of these in the lives of people like Harry Shaughnessy of Wake Forest, North Carolina – in the flickerings and the questions.

It’s from Daniel Burke’s profile of Shaughnessy and family.  The piece is on cnn.com, but I am reading it in the measured way I’d read a New Yorker profile.  There are snapshots and videos, the whole multimedia package, but frankly, the prose piece is sufficient unto itself.

The photograph is of Charlotte and Harry Shaughnessy.