The Soul and Its Enemies by Stephen Barr National Review Dec. 3,2007

Countering the materialists, Christian and not

For 2,000 years, Christians have believed that man has a spiritual soul and is therefore unique among terrestrial creatures--that there is in the words of Pople John Paul II, an ontological discontinuity between human beings and other animals. This belief is now under attack and not only by atheists. Some theologians dismiss the idea of an immortal soul as an unbiblical bit of Greek metaphysics grafted onto the Gospel by the earlyChurch Fathers. Some even go so far as to call themselves "Christian materialists"

These are symptoms of a loss of confidence in the face of a materialist critique that many think unanswerable. A whole series of advances in human knowledge have been seen as supporting a physicalist reductionism that would explain man entirely in terms of matter and thereby erase the the line between human and animal, and even between human and machine.

This article is worth searching out --- Tish