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.

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Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a
tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till
I cry then scatter my ashes
thru the Lower East Side

The Lower East Side, or Loisaida, still has a very vibrant pulse and that’s why Mr. Algarin still lives here. Algarin’s latest work Survival Supervencia surveys the neighborhood through all of its changes for the good and the bad.

Survival Supervencia is an anthology of poetry and prose by the critically-acclaimed and “King of Loisaida,” Miguel Algarin. The poems range from 1974 to the present day. Most of them deal with the problems that Puerto Rican immigrants and their children had to deal with in the last half of the 20th century. While Algarin’s works focus on the small area of the world that exists between 14th Street and Houston Street, between 1st Avenue and Avenue D, his words ring a very universal tone.

Algarin often speaks of the language of Nuyorican (New York + Puerto Rico). It is the language of the streets. It is a raw language, one that has a rhythm and a soul and should not be cast aside by the elite as a cop-out for immigrants. Algarin is a master and one of the fore fathers of Nuyorican. Despite the fact that he is known for having a keen ear to the street and a hand to the heart of the city he is also a professor of English at Rutgers University and is in love with Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare.

Keats knew that he was going to die at a very young age and his writing reflected that. Every word was true and it meant something. With Algarin it is almost the same thing. He lived in a place and time where people that were close to him were dying at an alarming rate. Algarin lived through the heroin epidemic, the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic and the poverty and violence that he endured while living in Loisaida. His writing reflects this. Reading his poetry is like seeing a man have his head held under water and then taken out, but he knows that he’s going back under, and he spouts out every emotion that’s in his heart.

The Lower East Side of Manhattan is an ever changing neighborhood that Algarin has seen go through some dramatic changes since his arrival there in 1951. Last week I sat with an iced coffee at outdoor café on Avenue B and 6th street. Thirty-three years ago Algarin wrote:

when Bimbo shows the anguish on his mind
and despairs that living on Avenue B between
6th and 7th streets keeps him delivering his child to
Bellevue’s emergency room for lung treatment
because too much ghetto dirt has clogged his lungs,
cold chills invade his little body…

After reading this passage, I felt bad that I had enjoyed my iced coffee on the same block that this poem took place. Like everything neighborhoods change and life keeps moving. More than anything Algarin is aware of this. He deals with the four major events in life extremely well; birth, lust, love and death.

As someone who is fascinated by New York City neighborhoods and their evolution I was enthralled by this anthology of life in Loisaida. Survival Supervivencia gives tremendous insight into a world that has not been exposed to middle America.

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