Sammy and Beckett’s Book Blog

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series)
Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2009

If fundamentalism is as Terry Eagleton claims a “failure of the imagination,” Reason, Faith, and Revolution is his attempt to show how religion’s liberal opponents and their ultra-rationalist arguments have suffered the same intellectual failures as those that they attack. It argues that those who decry religion on a shallow, literal reading of holy texts are ceding the interpretation of the most intrinsic philosophical questions regarding humanity to fundamentalists. Accordingly, the critics of faith will never be able to seriously challenge religion’s legitimacy, unless they start engaging it at its intellectual peaks instead of in its troughs. Upon closer examination it becomes clear that Eagleton’s intellectual engagement is a classic Marxist critique of the relationship between science and religion. Unable to pass wholesale judgement, Eagleton examines each ideology on its worldly successes and failures―raising the level of the debate about how to deal with the increasingly violent clash between late capitalism and the fervent forms of spirituality that have cropped up in both the United States and in Middle East. Perhaps more importantly in, “an era in which the political left stands in dire need of good ideas,” this point of view could inject some humanity into the cold technocratic form of liberalism that now dominates Western intellect thought.

The strength of the critiques offered in Reason, Faith, and Revolution rest on their ability to place both liberalism and Christianity under the same microscope, all the while giving full due to the liberating effects that these movements have had on humanity. On the creation of modernity, Eagleton gives the liberal Enlightenment its full due: “Liberalism is an exhilarating tale of emancipation from the prelates and patriarchs, insisting as it does on the scandalous truth that men and women are free, equal, self-determining agents simply by virtue of their membership of the human species….In its heyday, middle-class liberalism was far more of revolutionary current than socialism has ever managed to be.” However, he is quick to point out that, “the language of the Enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically comprised science, and a permanent war economy.” That those hijackers of humanist ideals have now turned the language of neo-liberal ideology onto the articles of the faith is the main affront that Eagleton seeks to expose.

In his interpretation of Christianity’s questioning of the human condition, Eagleton finds the same revolutionary ferment that clearly excites him in the early stages of the Enlightenment, observing that even today, “theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world–one whose subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself.” However, as one might expect, he also finds much of the intellectual betrayal and dilution plaguing the faithful that plagues the faithless: “it is Christianity itself which is primarily responsible for the intellectual sloppiness of its critics….it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own roots. Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that of the rich and aggressive.” It is this appropriation of Christianity that “has wrought untold misery in human affairs,” just as it is the blind purveyors of progress that have allowed imperialism and its later incarnation of global corporatism to flourish on the basis of liberal doctrines.

At a time when much political and philosophical theological debate veers between postmodern explanation and neo-liberal denunciation, Reason, Faith, and Revolution is an example of just how powerful a tool Marxist criticism can still be in addressing the human condition. Marxism is also what makes Eagleton the critic that he is, as he himself acknowledges: “no other doctrine I know of claims that the liberal Enlightenment…has been at once and the same time an enthralling advance in humanity and an insupportable nightmare―the latter tale, moreover, as verso of the recto of the former, the two colliding histories structurally complicit rather than contingently cheek by jowl.” This peculiar form of ideological awareness, where one refuses to see even its own progress without the comprises its made and the setbacks that have befallen it, keeps Marxism relevant and serves as a warning to all those who take their own ideologues at face value.

The fight between Macmillan and Amazon over the price of ebooks illustrates some of the problems that publishers, and indirectly authors have with Amazon’s current business model — authors Tobias Buckell and Charles Stross weigh in.

Library Thing gives you listings of local bookstores and events, as well as the closest library.

I found it impossible to slowly read this article on the importance of slowness, I had to keep coming back to it because I would start skimming after a few sentences — I still haven’t finished.

Jesse Pearson recently interviewed our most infamous professor of college English in Vice. In the interview Bloom identified the internet as having the potential to both enhance and degrade one’s reading experience:

If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.

Such simply put statements are what has left Bloom’s supporters and detractors hanging on to his every utterance for nearly half a century.

The digitizing project will save nearly 60,000 deteriorating and out of print books for posterity, while increasing public access to historical material.

I have complicated feelings about the “best of” lists the come out at the end of every year. Book lists are usually more prescriptive than descriptive, lacking the depth that makes criticism worth reading in the first place, and the regularity and predictability with which they are produced — often citing works that have already received plenty of attention elsewhere — makes them monotonous to the point of cliche. However,  I love list, literary and otherwise, and this year had some really good ones — so here’s my list of the lists:

The LA Times: Forgotten Treasures of the Last Century — This list was full of titles that I’d always meant to read, but hadn’t.
HTML Giant: 20 Important Books in Other Languages — Reminded me of how Anglo/American my reading habits are.
The Millions: Year in Reading — I’ve already mentioned how interesting all the guest posting in this series are.

The NY Times’ Paper Cuts blog recently pointed out the new trend of selling individual short stories. Reportedly,  The Atlantic has made an exclusive deal with Amazon to distribute new fiction through the Kindle system. While smaller operations, like One Story and Madras Press, are charging for similar content in online issues and chapbooks respectively.

To highlight their recent review of Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon The Second Pass has started posting excerpts of interesting historical/literary letters. Recent posts have included letters by E.B. White and Flannery O’Connor.

The online journal’s A Year in Reading series picks from some great authors like, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Sarvas, Philip Lopate and Stephen Dodson.