Yes, certainly he does—and as a result he practically deifies her, and the church made her a saint. I suppose I am suggesting that a mother’s participation need not be treated as so odd as to be miraculous, requiring the separate category of grace, but what one should expect.

Not to say that mothers aren’t miraculous. And perhaps this category of grace is what we need to do justice to their work.

This is of course part of the problem that Alasdair MacIntyre has been addressing for some time; his classic statement occurs in chapter one of After Virtue. You may already be aware of this, but I thought it worth a mention.

…The idea is, no argument between people really gets solved by argument. It gets solved by a total transition in states of affairs, to a new plane of existence (so to speak), and with it, a new set of questions.

I agree — If both atheists and theists are each claiming “rationality” proves their respective cases, then there really is no room for productive debate or dialog anyway. This is easy for me to say, of course, but the only starting point for an open-ended or productive dialog would be to accept that rationality *per se* is agnostic when it comes to a theistic God, and then all sides could work on a base of respecting a pluralistic variety of supplements to rationalism *per se*. Yet this is precisely what ideologues will never do, as they all want to claim reason substantiates their side; neither “militant” atheists nor theists making too-strong claims for rationality will accept the more humble terms required for a potentially productive dialogue. I don’t think the God-question is nonsense, though, just that the answer is supra-rational.