Is this a Debate?

In one of the RSVP emails I came across someone saying something like: "I'm RSVPing for the debate between Marcus and Habermas." Is this a debate? Well...not exactly. We're trying not to make this a debate but rather to make it a dialogue. As I said in an earlier post: we think that Marcus and Habermas are going to have enough shared langauge to make a dialogue possible and yet enough difference to make it interesting. If we've made this look like a debate by the title of it, "Two Views on the Resurrection," well...its hard to advertise something that deals with subtle differences in a compelling way. Or at least we're primarily expecting subtle differences. And yet none of us have really read much that Habermas has written or that Marcus has written so we really have no idea what will happen in the dialogue. And then there's the unknown factor of audience participation at the end. So we expect it to be interesting, but we're not trying to make it a formal "debate." If you want a debate, you'll have to wait for Hillary and Pataki.