Slow down

 

I've been at this blog over a decade, but this year I've needed to slow down even more than the past couple of years. My tendonitis + eyestrain necessitate my screen time be devoted first to my work, which increasingly demands online attention for hours daily, seven days a week. So don't be disappointed. I will share some of my academic reviews as well as popular ones at PopMatters and Spectrum Culture when I get a bit more time off in two months. Stay tuned: see you virtually soon.
(Photo.)

Ross Douthat's "To Change the Church: Pope Francis + the Future of Catholicism": Book Review

As the token Catholic/ conservative columnist for the NY Times, Ross Douthat, is a journalist I've enjoyed reading even when much of the rest of that paper of record I want to toss at my dog. (I refrain, strengthening my patience.) Douthat may be better at short opinion pieces than in-depth reporting, but as he's a central spokesman for the right-leaning Church, he's well informed to look at how the current pope is caught between a liberal rock pushing Francis towards more reform and more renewal, and the conservative hard place refusing to budge on doctrine and liturgy.

"To Change the Church" looks at the split. He does not have the rosy patronizing view many non-Catholics, less in the know about the Vatican and its global reach, have had about Jorge Berglogio SJ. Therefore it's instructive to learn about his stint as the Jesuit provincial during the times of dirty war and the disappeared in Argentina. Douthat has access to some insiders and he uncovers sobering truths. Some issues are dealt at length which those unfamiliar with the higher levels of the Church and intricate details of the bible and teachings may feel are exaggerated.

Douthat examines the compromises made by Pope Benedict to keep the traditionalists faithful, the growing rift between Vatican II advocates who demand more changes, the younger clergy and bishops who favor caution instead of chaos, and the recent pronouncements hinted regarding re-examination of the "nullity of marriage" vs. the indissolubility of the bonds which Jesus affirmed, within the German-Austrian episcopate's "Kaspar debate." These provocative topics reveal teachings that Pope Francis could not budge on without undermining fidelity to the Gospel. I hadn't considered before this how central this stance proved, whereas as Douthat documents, many other recent debates on tricky issues have not depended on this fundamental grounding in the Gospel. He digs into some "sources" who reveal how complicated this astute and considerably diplomatic (take that word in more than one sense) pontiff's maneuvers are. This is a corrective, again, to popular misconceptions and media.

Abuses we all are unfortunately somewhat cognizant of take up many headlines by outside writers investigating the Church. So it's refreshing to turn to other topics which tend not to gain serious attention in the mainstream press. Douthat, like John Thavis' "The Vatican Diaries," is a good guide. Douthat is not the resident correspondent Thavis has been in Rome, but he shares that reporter's understanding of the Church from the inside.

I am not sure I buy into Douthat's rather dire predictions of a schismatic division within Catholicism. Yet if it wasn't for massive Latino immigration, parish pews would be even emptier than they tend to be now. It looks as if the future Church will shift to African power, away from Europe, as in turn it moved from the Mediterranean and back to Jerusalem. The "developing world" with its burgeoning populations has skirmishes between Protestants, Catholics, and in some places Islam or as in China the secular regime. Here are the battlegrounds and the launch pads for a form of the Church which may soon overtake the "spiritual but not religious" West. After Francis, who knows what will follow?

Douthat also wrote a sprawling 2011 narrative-survey about the shifts of U.S. religious currents over the past generation, "Bad Religion," espousing not the ethos of a SoCal veteran punk band, but what Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option" has since popularized (?) concerning the role the Church will likely play in the changing American polity. This takes on the wider variety of Christian denominations within recent American culture and history, but it's recommended for those wanting more from this welcome voice. I reviewed "BR" at length a few months ago on this site. Amazon US 4-12-18
(Reprinted at The Pensive Quill 9-26-18.)

Benjamin Schewel's "7 Ways of Looking at Religion": Book Review

Three approaches to the study of religion tend to dominate. Surveys of tradition exemplified by Huston Smith, theories such as those pioneered by Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and cultural themes as with power, gender, ritual, and belief typify this trio. None of these satisfied Benjamin Schewel, so a decade ago, he began writing a guide he could not find: this one maps a broader view.

In turn, seven perspectives beckon. These elucidate "the narrative commitments that undergird the various strands of the contemporary academic discourse on religion." (194) For each chapter, Schewel introduces a framework, a justification for its inclusion, and three exponents of the type.

Secularization unsurprisingly stimulates reactions by philosophers and historians of religion. Starting off, the inroads made by rational pursuits upon spiritual programs encourage three thinkers. Daniel Dennett suggests various suppositions about the evolution of religious tendencies and strategies on how these might be diminished now. John Dewey embraces naturalism instead of supernaturalism. Marcel Gauchet charts how religion has gradually declined as human-centered projects supplant it.

After summing up these subtractive responses, Schewel ends chapter one by suggesting alternatives. Charles Taylor's framework acknowledges transcendence yet otherwise aligns with Dewey's angle. Dewey's argument can be appreciated apart from his "non-spiritual worldview." (30) Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's data on the persistence of faith among "vulnerable populations" demonstrate a subtraction narrative of how the Scandinavian paucity of believers dwindles when tallied against increasing levels of income inequality and power disparity for billions in the rest of today's world.

This structure, of introduction, presentation times three, and consideration of that approach pro and con, repeats half-a-dozen times in this short study. Schewel proves a diligent investigator as he shows readers twenty-one takes via seven types. Although why he chooses his theorists remains tacit, each proponent has his (for no female expounders make the cut) fair say. He remains balanced and poised.

Inverting subtraction, the void left by the loss of religion might be filled by a move from the margins back into the center of society. An opposite movement regards this shift "as a sign of humanity's growing desire for substantive spiritual renewal." (33) Virtue ethics imbued with a Catholic influence satisfies Alasdair MacIntyre. Recovery of the pre-Socratic openness towards investigation pleases Martin Heidegger. The resurgence of the purity of "golden-age Islam" comforts Muhammed Iqbal.

For Schewel, the simple fact that three disparate proposals coexist weakens any particular appeals to a tradition. He wonders why another solution might appear, independent of these three legacies.

Modernity may energize religion, rather than dissipate its spirit. The two forces need not oppose one another. He often cites Charles Taylor, the first of Schewel's transsecularist scholars. Taylor promotes "exclusive humanism" as but one element in an "immanent frame" broadening "metaphysical and theological conceptions in a way that premodern cultures could not." (57) By page 61, Schewel repeats a Taylor quote from two chapters earlier, but at least it's a lively excoriation of the excesses of Latin Christendom's demands. Schewel summarizes A Secular Age, and then sums up that summary. Granted, Taylor's "illuminating and profound" account deserves careful credit, for the students likely to turn to 7 Ways during an upper-level seminar or first-year graduate course will welcome a précis.

Yet, for Schewel, Taylor "ends up perpetuating a falsely nativist historical world-view" dismissing "the robust global contexts within which the modern West emerged." (63) A slump, for another observer of Western prospects, accounts for a model of an open American but monopoly European Christian market competing for the unchurched by offering believers rewards. Schewel exposes flaws in Rodney Stark's analogy, although remaining more sympathetic to Jeffrey Stout's dogged avowal of "constructive religious contributions to public discourse" (74) which advance America's democracy.

Secular and secularism share with natural and naturalism multivalent meanings. The first pair examines how religion plays out in modernity; science provides the domain for postnaturalist encounters. Their prevalence in the United States convinced Schemel that a whole category merited selection for chapter 4. Thomas Nagel's effort to assert "some kind of Platonism" as a teleological foil against the excesses of neo-Darwinian assertions for cosmic evolution incites Schemel's longest rebuttal thus far. However, he typically returns to an equitable ruling,, here on Nagel's strengths.

Hans Jonas reports Gnostic tendencies reoccurring in the modern Western intellectual as well as religious legacies. Alfred North Whitehead's historical and scientific details from a century ago need revision, but Schewel guardedly agrees with Whitehead's quest to reconcile science and religion.

Similarly, intellectual history motivates a construction narrative which looks at the massive alteration religion causes in human affairs. In too-brief an entry, Talal Asad points back to medieval Christian monasticism resulting much later in the privatization of belief and practice. Guy Strousma considers the cause of missionaries encountering the wider world in the early modern era, and their effect on an outmoded Christian and Eurocentric polity. So does Jason Josephson, examining Japanese reactions to Western intrusions. He corrects Edward Said's miscalculated locus for Orientalism, moving it from the Middle to the Far East; Josephson details Japanese influences upon Western religious notions.

Schewel approves of this historian's argument, and by devoting more space to a specific case study, articulates for a new audience Josephson's contributions. Moving onto a venerable alternative look at non-Western ideas, perennial conceptions which stretch beyond the expected Traditionalists. Instead, Aldous Huxley's now-dated but certainly stimulating outlook reminds us of the value of spiritual objectivity. John Hick's admission that such a religious reality not only exists but exceeds finite human comprehension, and that this realization generates other-centeredness away from selfishness, extends Huxley's stance. Hick's "metaphysical ambiguity" complements Rudolf Otto's arousal of love and fear into the numinous experience. Schewel settles for siding with Hick's defined transcendence.

Development and growth occupy the last thematic chapter, commencing with G.W.F. Hegel's proposal that as humans understand God better, so religion advances. The density of this thesis demands articulation, which Schewel adds. He leans away from the Eurocentricity based on Hegel's limited global knowledge. Karl Jaspers' Axial Age formulation helps. Schewel realizes its limitations, but he reminds readers that its general scaffolding has stood up to sociological inspection. Robert Bellah's interplay between "cognitive capacities" and religious stages over history incorporates Jaspers' chronology, even as Bellah hesitates at the suggestion that a second Axial Age awaits us soon. Still, as Schewel puts it pithily, Bellah fails to answer the basic question: "Why religion?"

Concluding, Schewel opts for a synthesis of the best that each of these seven typologies may proclaim. He warns that he is not giving us a history of religion, but a narrative of religious history. Like Hick, Schewel avers that a spiritual reality exceeds human understanding. He parallels the developmental narrative by highlighting the tribal, archaic, Axial Age (extended until ca. 1500 C.E.), early modern, and global stages of religious emergence. His two-dozen pages depart from tying his guided tour to its theoretical predecessors, and Schewel inserts rather a brisk overview of millennia.

His prospectus predicts that religion will occupy a major role in global affairs. Plurality of religions within competing communities will spread and accelerate. Leading figures will try to alter this future by aggressive or amicable means. Globalization serves for Schewel as a benign process enabling a mature application of how "religion's many constructive powers can be effectively encouraged" while discouraging its less amenable expressions. (191) The intellectual elite will consider religious compatibility with "the natural-scientific framework." Finally, a second Axial Age may emerge.

This reference may spark conversations among those learning about the philosophy of religion, as well as its history and cultural aspects. Schewel discusses these concepts in academic language, but he lapses into neither jargon nor cant. His endnotes not only document but in some cases enrich his text with further commentary. Nearly 250 sources display Schewel's wide range of research. Given the complexity of this content, the index assists comprehension of its many assertions. That book which Schewel had not found now can be found, and may it ease the perplexity of many inquirers.
(Reading Religion 2/21/18 in edited form)

Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now": Book Review

Think of Aristotle's "flourishing" as our human fulfillment. That aligns well with Steven Pinker's argument addressing "people who care about arguments." Impatient with both the claims of traditional religious systems and of New Age "magical thinking," he elaborates on the critique made last year by Kurt Anderson in "Fantasyland" about the decline in rational thinking across the political spectrum in America. Defending "mainstream intellectual culture," this Harvard professor of psychology expands on his "The Better Angels of Our Nature" to prove--by about 85 charts over hundreds of pages--that progress and the goals of the Enlightenment matter most for our recognition of human progress and critical thinking.

He begins by noting the Axial Age as spun into motion by the "energy capture" of more calories from agriculture to 20,000 a day in various forms. This growth in sophisticated thinking and social organization was enhanced by language, "the original memory app." Countering entropy, information and evolution allow people to overcome a naturally "illiterate and innumerate" existence, while battling the specters of "blind justice" and sky-gods.

Part 2 looks at progress. He translates data into drama, as when after a chart of declining infant mortality 1751-2013 he eloquently reminds us of the tragedy and hope behind such dry measurements, within so many families past and present. He turns to the nuclear threat and finds it exaggerated; the Doomsday Clock's a "propaganda stunt." Pinker assures us that most terrorists are "bumbling schlemieles." and that "nuclear scare tactics" blind us to the success post-1945 of treaties and commonsense. As for the 45th President, Pinker eschews over-estimating any apocalyptic outbreak and he puts such a leader in place as spawned by a current blip in "authoritarian populism." He emphasizes the advances overall in our stability and success due to "systematic forces" over centuries, and cautions us against "dystopian rhetoric" about passing politicians amidst media hype. He notes that the "alt-right" comprises 50,000 in the U.S., 0.02 of the population.

The warning about media frenzy continues through the lengthy part 3, where reason, science, and humanism through a variety of fields and short chapters scan considerable ground across not only the sciences but some of the humanities. Pinker may have, for all his erudition, stretched himself here beyond his expertise but this is a popular book, meant to "defy any simple narrative" and to encourage reflective analyses. He's encouraged by curricula promoting critical skills to thwart an endemic polarization in beliefs expressing "identity-protective cognition." That is, when humans can't let go of opinions long held for the outmoded likes of tribal glory and one's personally elevated status within the in-crowd. This leftover default reaction we all inherit has weakened our ability to engage in rational public discourse. He suggests that the media depoliticize issues, distinguish facts from claims, and detach news coverage from an imitation of extreme sports coverage by pundits when it comes to observing and promoting the political scene through journalism. Quixotic as this may be, it's encouraging to hear this sensible proposal.

He draws on work by his partner, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, to bolster his refutation of theist proofs. He avers our ancestors were not always trustworthy, and that "dunce-cap history" dumbs down the plain fact that religion is not a source of morality, and that scientists and philosophers might be, after all the myth and the mystical, right about the fundamental questions of existence. He shrugs away any notion that this universe is fine-tuned by a Creator, and reckons we're lucky to have won the equivalent of the cosmic jackpot, in our good fortune to live as and where we do.

I did find, for all my amateur status as a lay reader, some places where the assertions flew by without necessary verification. For instance, early on Pinker asserts that IQ scores prove that we're smarter than our ancestors by "two standard deviation points." But in a paragraph where other information has documentation in end-notes, this particular point does not. I wanted to know who determined this finding, and over how long had it been determined. If we're "smarter by 30 points than our ancestors," has this been due to schooling and literacy, or to other factors? This kind of reasoning exhibits the foundations upon which Pinker's broad thesis rests, so one expects that each iota of detail supports his general assessment.

"Enlightenment Now" displays a bit of welcome wit and a sharp intellect at work. As Pinker reiterates, romantic reactions and reactionary ideologies will not assist our survival. Our health increases, our longevity lengthens, our liberty broadens, and our happiness rises. Pinker's no Pangloss or Pollyanna, but he hammers home the evidence amassed and displayed that any problems with our predicament remain inevitable on the upward trajectory, if "defying any simple narrative." 450 closely printed pages of text elucidating this and 75 pages of documentation display how no catch phrases or naive platitudes can capture the considerable and ever-increasing complexity of how humans continue to move forward.

(This was distributed to me in an advance reading copy by the publisher, and that does not effect my review in any way. Thanks for reading it.) Posted with slight changes to Amazon US 2/13/18.

Thomas Laqueur's "The Work of the Dead": Book Review

• Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, October 2015. 736 pages. $39.95. Hardcover. ISBN 9780691157788.

 For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.

This tome counters the wish of Diogenes the Cynic, who wanted his corpse to be tossed over a wall to be devoured by beasts. Berkeley historian Thomas W. Laqueur, whose earlier books compiled cultural surveys of the body and gender from the Greeks to Freud, and of masturbation, turns to another intimate subject: “What death leaves behind through the dead body” (xiv) takes the reader chronologically through four in-depth phases of “why the dead body matters” (1).

Laqueur applies the longue durée approach of the French Annales school to prehistoric and ancient times. Respect for the corpse, acknowledgement of its occupation at the borders of nature and culture, placement of the death of one within the social order, and how the dead “help make” our modern world comprise part 1. However, the bulk of Laqueur’s evidence derives from 1680-2000, within the purview of his expertise in English, Western European, and North American settings. This imbalance qualifies the breadth of his subtitle, but it enables a very detailed account of the post-Enlightenment gradual transition from churchyard and ecclesiastical supervision to cemetery and secular commemoration. Laqueur plumbs archives.

Documenting this shift from a space where the dead count within a weakened clerical presence, in slow pivot to a twentieth-century emphasis upon names and who the dead were, structures parts 2 and 3. Laqueur ends with what the dead consist of, when the radical revival of cremation represents a rejection of the bodily resurrection of the hallowed cadaver.

This arc spans vast accumulations of material, physical and spiritual, intellectual and religious. The enchantment and re-enchantment of the living towards the dead offers “the greatest possible history of the imagination” (17). Having despaired of extracting the testimonies of those dying, Laqueur asks instead what the living “did with and through real dead bodies,” by analyzing “what their acts meant and mean to them” (18). Relics, idolatry, aura, fakery, and necromancy display early human attempts to deal with this mortal predicament. Revenants, souls, and spirits share varieties of “persistence of being” as a “shared community” within a “complex of meanings” in his second chapter. Here, the power the dead exert over our own minds encompasses erudite reactions from Epicurus and Calvinists through Milan Kundera and Slavoj Žižek.

This collective effort of caring for what is left of the departed dwells within a “gap between what they are and what we take them to be” (81). Religion, art, politics, and poetry, in this scholar’s estimation, would not exist otherwise. This grand statement may give pause, as it may elude verification. It attests to Laqueur’s ambitious attempt to add the particular to the cosmic.

In such sweeping claims, this book leaves its most powerful impact. The granular accumulation of proof will assist academics, for it gathers arcane studies and diligent interpretations into a valuable volume. Yet as hundreds of pages demonstrate, these particulars pile up as densely as did effluvia and bones in dank churchyards that archeologists have unearthed and gravediggers had lamented. The “regime of the dead” presses down indelibly. Laqueur calculates the ratio (miniscule) between the remnants left by bones and fluids in comparison to the amount (considerable) excreted by the living within an industrialized city. Victorian reformers demanded hygiene. Their false claims of the danger of the rank corpse accelerated the trend away from crammed churchyards to planned meadows. There, increasing ranks of the dead did not wait for Judgment Day in elegiac and venerable plots where families had long relegated their village departed. In cemeteries, picnickers and strollers could enjoy their visits, where the “new regime” created “a novel and luxuriantly protean space” (212). 

Romantic-era notions of pastoral slumber presaged communal creation of the funeral industry and the bureaucratic register. Dramatizing memory, venerating preservation, admitting finitude, and defying salvation, modern habits of paying respect to the departed superseded ecclesiastical rites.

Burial plots and fancy funerals appealed as the poor imitated their betters. Exhumations exemplified the rationales for artistic, legal, criminal, medical, and clerical examinations. Again, Laqueur totes up intricate processes, which counted on the assurance that all the dead, in peace or especially in war, were accounted for, regulated, and tallied up neatly.

Naming the disembodied embeds them as a “reinscription of loss, one of its poor avatars, a substitute, a placeholder, a trace of a trace” (366). Laqueur may move his readers in such pauses from his scrutiny. He displays the “unprecedented scale” of technical, political, and emotional means by which recent mourners, brokers, claimants, and heirs collude to ensure post-mortem precision. Less than a third of twenty-six billion people born between 1500 and 2010 are known to us. Mormon genealogists labor to baptize all dead. Obituaries proclaimed public notice as newspapers expanded literacy and popularized devotions. These ceremonial practices generate a “commemorative culture” from the Civil War on, one which left thousands of memorials, modest or monumental, to the “absent but present dead,” among which were many vanished or irretrievable casualties of the Great War.

The author rarely admits the personal, but an aside merits mention. His father’s 1929 alma mater, a Hamburg gymnasium, lists those who died “fighting for Germany” together with those “as victims of the Holocaust” (423). Technological and emotional imperatives combine in massive records of both world wars, which made “knowing both possible and necessary” (466).

Cremation demoted death “to its physiological basis,” says Laqueur (509). Protestants interpreted the restoration of the body at the Last Judgment as metaphorical. The need to rest a body in sacred ground dwindled. Body, memory, and locale nevertheless persist today as obligations. Continuity in The Work of the Dead, Laqueur concludes, endures even as medical progress prevents acceptance of mortality among desperate families who seek, inevitably, miracles.

Date of Review: 

December 29, 2017

About the Author

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Reading Religion (1/4/18)

John Lennox's "God's Undertaker": Book Review

I read this right after David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. That formidable study in an endnote directed me to the somewhat (until the math and biology kicked in halfway) more accessible God's Undertaker investigating if religious inquiries trump materialist dogma as to if an intelligence (steady there--as agency or impetus rather than design per se?) might be discerned. John Lennox, as a professor of mathematics and fellow in the philosophy of science at Oxford, handles data confidently, adroitly, and commendably with modesty tempered from both and all sides. I did enjoy his witty analogies summing up the various ways science itself calculates the immense odds against our being here at all. And it's not merely the Anthropic Principle all over again.

He nods often to a bete noire of the New Agnostics, Michael Behe. I admit this straightaway, as this will already cause many to write off Lennox. He credits Behe's 'edge of evolution' imagery supporting an originator outside time and space generating evolution as "less random that is often supposed." He denies, however, this is the God of the Gaps yet again. You can read far more context than I can sum up at exactly the halfway point of the book (I refer to my Kindle page 320/638).

A bit later on (61% 391/638), Lennox repeats a helpful analogy that "the message is not derivable" on a printed page "from the physics and chemistry of paper and ink." These are deep waters, but he's discussing that the DNA code sequence's "order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed page." The vexing predicament of how to solve "biogenesis" by "a simple-minded appear to Darwinian-like processes" comes down to how the mutating replicator modelled by Dawkins could "even get going in the absence of life" and set in motion natural selection. At 56% 358/638, Lennox quotes Stephen Meyer: 'What needs to be explained is not the origin of order... but the origin of information." This sets up his main focus.

It got a bit easier, and more memorable for me, after his curated array of those witty analogies. The typing monkey argument dating back to Huxley vs. Wilberforce in 1860 Oxford asked whether random apes would eventually peck out one of Shakespeare's poems--or even an entire tome. Lennox avers this is unlikely the provenance as not until 1874 did typewriters hit the market--typical of the author's attentive eye! Regardless, a simulator since 2003's generating a monkey every second hitting a key, with 100 original chimps doubling every few days adds up (in the book's 2009 revision) to the then-current record of "24 consecutive letters from Shakespeare's Henry IV produced in 10^40 monkey years (the age of the universe is estimated at less than 10^11 years)." (68% 438/638)

Other memorable comparisons: the odds of us being here as is=a coin being hit by a shot from across the 20 billion light years "halo"; if coins stacked up across the American continent (or is the nation?) as high as the moon, and this was repeated on a billion more continents, what if a red-marked coin was placed by you at random? And if your friend found it first go when you challenged her, that'd be the odds of what some (if not in this book, curiously) call our own "Goldilocks" just-right universe.

Three-quarters of the way (484/638), Lennox wonders why scientists are able to accept, say, alien presence if SETI received a sequence of signalled prime numbers, yet they deny intelligent agency when it comes to similar deductions gathered in this book from a wide variety of academic experts. "We instinctively infer 'upwards' to an ultimately intelligent causation rather than 'downwards' to chance and necessity." He mentions that in the film Expelled, even Richard Dawkins appears to "have moved his ground towards admitting that design is something that, in principle, could be recognized by science." I looked this up and apparently he and fellow atheists claimed they were duped into appearing in this 2007 documentary. I'd add that Lennox relying on the supposed conversion of Anthony Flew very late in his long life has similarly been criticized for believers taking advantage.

[I am between a 4 and 5 star {on Amazon} but given the Flew incident already happened prior to the revision, this influences my rating down; I am unsure if this revision came before or after the post-Expelled disclaimer by Dawkins and other scientists, so Lennox gets the benefit of the doubt there.]

This is a diligently and incredibly complex summation of the debate about whether "science has buried God." John Lennox stays honest, recognizing his and his colleagues' limitations alongside their expansion of what reason and care have discovered, by the wonder of mathematics and physics. He concludes that "far from science having buried God, not only do the results of science point towards his existence, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence." (87% 560/638)

I approached this with no preconceptions. I've studied the big names from the opposition of late, and I've (as with Hart and Francis Collins) balanced religious adherents who've accounted for themselves in these debates. The analogies for me sparked my imagination most, but those with more ability in the maths and sciences will want to turn to the data Lennox sifts and scrutinizes. He keeps an approachable tone through dense discussion, he quotes liberally and helpfully for the greater public, and he evaluates evidence and methods from all comers. Worth your attention. (Amazon US 1/23/18)

P.S.This first pdf is a simple outline of the book. This second pdf sums up the documentation, quotation, and summarization page by page. This third pdf is the entire 2009 revised edition.
P.P.S. In Steven Pinker's forthcoming Enlightenment Now, he offers an unanswerable riposte to fine-tuning, which has occurred to me often. What if we're the Powerball lottery winner, and that's enough? We should count our luck instead of our blessings, that we beat the odds against us.

The March of Time

Today, my wife's marching for a second year downtown with hundreds of thousands of Angelenos, mostly women, with fewer children, dogs, and men. I reflect on the past year and more, but often since the last election, I prefer to retreat into my books, whether Kindle or print, to read reflectively.

Rather than research for my "professional development" or reviews of new titles, this aims at not an external but an interior goal. The Benedictines called it lectio divina. Catholic schools when I attended may have called it spiritual reading. Whatever the post-Catholic varietal, I need this "safe space." But it's not that. It's one where I confront hopes and fears, anxieties as well as contemplation.

My wife and friends would doubtless interject this, when I am not spewing what they regard as a jumble of reactionary-neofascist elitist populism leaning towards left-libertarianism more than conventional (!) anarchism, that I am in this natural state unless roused by work, meals, or chores.

I am choosing as the hunches move me. Julian Barnes' harrowing Nothing to Be Frightened Of was peddled a baker's dozen years ago as the first "post-Dawkins" take on mortality and our fears of death. Not sure about that, but despite or on account of his avuncular (albeit when he wrote this he was about four years older than I am now) digressions and erudite detours, his rambling ruminations and his Francophone excursions, I found his audio rendition so engrossing, listening to it in the dark before sleep, that I purchased a copy of the book. I liked the Canadian and British covers, with various Tarot/ chapbook depictions of Le Mort more fitting than the American version, which had his stereotypically featured English countenance, as Barnes (as myself if in a somewhat more Irish if also elongated physiognomy, I have been told by colleagues) looks exactly like a reader would expect.

Then I turned to my e-book public library's "if you liked this, then" options and browsed. The past year, since I discovered at last that the system had finally synched with Kindle, I've been borrowing audio and print (?) titles diligently, and I save 200 more as treats on my ever-changing moods wishlist. It's fun to preview samples, and like the bookstores where I have spent so long a part of my past life I am overwhelmed with tomes around where I type, and terribile dictu in the disarray of my garage, it's an efficient if frustrating (for there as in brick-and-mortal realm, so much is not where you want it electronically or physically--what you search for in vain only whets your appetite) pursuit.

I dutifully filled notes with many highlights of the next suggested title, the restive, grouchy (if not as acerbic as sensitive-plant critics had averred) David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. That formidable study (my review linked quotes extensively from Hart's dense analysis, rewarding if rambling) in an endnote directed me to the somewhat (until math and biology kicked in halfway) easier God's Undertaker investigating if religious inquiries trump materialist dogma as to if an intelligence (steady there--as agency or impetus rather than design per se?) might be discerned. Lennox as an informed scientist handles data confidently, adroitly. and commendably with modesty tempered from both and all sides, and I did enjoy his witty analogies summing up the various ways science itself calculates the immense odds against our being here at all. And it's not merely the Anthropic Principle all over again. He marshals detailed arguments and documents them.

Both Lennox and Hart share a commendable connection with Barnes and the author I will mention next. They all expect a sophisticated audience (Hart perhaps too much as his volume, the only one from a university press, expects philosophers whereas a lot of "laypeople" are curious sorts who want to know precisely where his quest aims) and they reward by upending some of our pet hobbyhorses.

Somehow I wound up no idea how (maybe one of the previous three authors quoted him) with G.K. Chesterton's 1908 Orthodoxy. Not the best title as he admitted, but he answered his foes who challenged him, after he took on the chattering classes' champions in Heretics, to respond in turn with his own metaphysical riposte. So this blend of blurred autobiography (shades of Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, I wonder?) and theological assertion of the necessity of paradox as the manner in which people grasp feebly the shards of the divine presence and plan in what seem contradictory fashion served as the prolific (too much, that) pundit's foray into theological discourse for the rest of us. Many admire GKC's aplomb. Fewer admit he can exhaust one's patience with his relentless reversals.

Maisie Ward's early biography of her friend, who was published by the firm of Sheed & Ward she co-founded, has been relegated as a "hagiography" in Garry Wills' first book on GKC which for all its acumen does smack as he'd admit now of the eager grad student more than the sagacious scholar he became. Apropos of saint-hailing, the blogger "Innocent Smith" offers a needed reminder that if the fringes alone claim GKC and his circle for their own cause only, this bodes not well for all.

Ward too takes pains now and then to call GKC to task, for after his conversion to the Church finally occurred in 1921, his compulsive, frenetic graphomania on top of a regular lecture circuit far and wide rendered a lot of his various genres into padded, rumbustious postures which seemed, at least to Wills, to have been set when GKC was barely in his twenties. Ward offers a nuanced portrait.

But she concurs that the quality suffered and the workload did him in, hastening his relatively premature demise. Still, late in her enjoyable consideration (if as she warns you may not want to learn all about his brother Cecil's entanglement in the Marconi case, which rivals Bleak House in its interminable litigation), she cites (anyone writing on GKC finds this necessity more than the usual subject may violate the standard 2:1 ratio I enforce for student assignments of originality to secondary material) him as usual, generously. In his talk in 1931 but perhaps printed in 1927, "Culture and the Common Peril," I found a pleasing echo of Hart's conclusion advising skillful contemplation, and Aldous Huxley's 1962 lecture to the Tavistock Institute, which I will quote after.

"The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves." GKC castigates the flood of information-but-not-knowledge, while Hart and current critics warn of our data overload empty of wisdom sifted from this inundation which a century on churns that flood into a tsunami.

About three decades after GKC's death, after more war, more automation, more standardization, Huxley reflected on his Brave New World Fordist scenario. The ultimate transformation, he opines, applies a subtler form of control than neural injections or tinkering with our bags of skin and water. Situated on the cusp of the counterculture, this speaker has been, a search of sites shows, linked by those where the far right meets the far left, and accused of conspiratorial aims. I will leave that surmise aside as I do rumors of reptilian overlords and ZOG machinations, but from the transcript: 

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” It's intriguing, if aesthetically maddening considering the manner in which dodgy websites present Huxley's less, uh, assigned musings, to find then Alan Watts' further reflections. (That is, I think it's him. This infuriatingly font-crazed resource credits an Alan Watt speech, 2006.) A drawback for the inquirer persists in that so many less mainstream sources simmer on suspicious blogs and addled archives which, to say the least, fail to meet tenured types' muster.

Stick around among the formerly mocked pop cultural fans, all the same, and at least safely employed academics may come to elevate what they once cast aside, as this next author proves. I thought of another prediction when I read GKC just after quoting that Huxley passage on FB. Philip K. Dick's exponentially closer to Huxley than Chesterton (although the latter has been credited by Adam Gopnik--drawing on previous judgments I suspect--as the "pivot" between Lewis Carroll/ Edward Lear and Kafka/ Borges. Anyone familiar with the Argentine Anglophone knows his admiration for Chesterton. I'd been thrown off, three decades ago, by The Man Who Was Thursday. I want to return to it without spoilers, having vaguely remembered the ending as extremely odd even by post-Victorian experimentation in the company of H.G, Wells, one of GKC's dear foils-as-friends. I speculate if PKD might have been directed, in his own late-life Gnostic virtual reality simulation, deep in his soul by tales subsuming spiritual as well as spectral confabulations, in a steampunk age.

PKD mused not long before his own untimely demise, in of all places a dreary Santa Ana condo: "Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.” Re: his Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974 SF novel.) He became agoraphobic but made sure to stay within walking distance of the post office and Trader Joe's, where he purchased frozen dinners and roast beef sandwiches. GKC, renowned for breadth and width, would've chuckled loud over his fellow fabulist.

PKD and I share a Californian (although he like another nearish neighbor Huxley I regard as blow-ins) curiosity about what's out there and within us. Huxley intrigues me far less as a popularizer of perennialism than as a skewed satirist; despite what many who see me think, inside lurks a touch of humor, albeit inappropriate invariably in these perpetually "outraged" and "scandalous" times these poetasters preached about all too accurately. GKC plays a shell game with rhetoric, entertaining as he instructs, but he can weary with his relentlessly paradoxical phrasing. Yet he pleases me for his "little England" outlook congenial with Tolkien and a scholar of these two men, Joseph Pearce and "distributism." Pearce and I are exact contemporaries, coming of age as exurbs paved over our childhood haunts. I anticipate naysayers of idealists and dreamers who will bring up Eric Gill (similar to Jefferson, we lecture others on their sins and not their successes) by advising a reread of John 8:7.

The Ball and the Cross, I figured, might be easier to start with, but I gave up the audio halfway in. Although Gildart Jackson tries his best to dramatize the madcap pursuits, I felt as if Heckle and Jeckle, or more precisely Tom and Jerry were bashing away at each other. You can see the warm-up for Orthodoxy: Brits landing on an island that perplexes them, lunatic asylums, lunatics, and an apocalyptic conclusion that again does not jibe with the main plot, but feels tacked on before and after, without surprise or suspense. I long for theological thrillers, a sadly neglected sub-genre I have tried to suss out from Goodreads and web inquiries but finding nearly nothing of note I have not noted. But GKC promotes a dour Scot, worse yet a humor-challenged Highland Catholic recusant, as his hero, while naturally the other Scot, an atheist bookseller, gets a few sputters of wit for his lot. I scanned the rest myself, but found it slapdash, meandering even for a brief novel, and a fusty curio.

I tried Sherlock Holmes a couple of years ago, figuring I'd delight in the Victorian London which captivates me. If I could go back in history, I'd enter the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace. To my letdown, although I liked re-reading A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, the stories did not grab me. Mysteries haven't done much for me. But talking to a close friend, I related how GKC forays led me to his favorite fictional character, James Bond, by a circuitous route through Maisie's friend Caryll Houselander, evidently a troubled type who saw visions and dreamed dreams as a Catholic convert turned mystic. She'd been left in the lurch by none other than "Sidney Reilly" (born a Rosenblum in the Tsarist pale) the "Ace of Spies" who inspired Ian Fleming's inventive 007.

My friend praised The Man Who Was Thursday as a story he'd returned to over and over with joy. Although no believer himself in what another friend of mine likes to relegate to "priestcraft," he likewise recommended the Father Brown mysteries of GKC. I've previewed online Michael Hurley's Penguin introduction and his explanation of their weird assumptions and wily craft suggests they may blend better for me than Sherlock in evoking GKC's unsettlement behind such searches for "truth." Michael Newton approves a recent BBC series, contrasting the priest with the deerstalker detective.

I have no profound wrap-up but I set down my jottings as a reminder to myself that the wanderings of whatever mind, spirit, soul and/or brain generates within me, set into type, mark wherever I'm at today. I don't call my orientation by any label or denomination or philosophy, and I leave that to academics who strive to categorize our irreducibly, incorrigible yearnings. As for me, I look ahead. Similar to Barnes, I deeply fear what may come. Like Hart, I inform myself on what others scoff at as metaphysics; as with Lennox, I try to keep up if lagging far behind with physics, if as it is for poets.

How I drift from book to book, quoteworthy utterance to dusty volume (even if digitized; public domain combined with a Kindle frees me of shelf-space guilt), remains explainable maybe to a scientist, but might a sage add a nod? As always, I ruminate. I wonder what and/or who's guiding me.

(photo credit)

David Bentley Hart's "The Experience of God": Book Review

I found out about David Bentley Hart from a review of his 2018 translation into blunt English of the clunky Greek often expressed in the New Testament. His acerbic reputation against "The New Atheists" as well as other thinkers who cross his sylvan path intrigued rather than dissuaded me, and I checked this out. This 2013 book is not a work of apolegetics, and not a defense of the proofs of God's existence. Instead, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss applies what the Hindu labeled as sat, chit, and ananda to assert the non-contingent, ultimate, and transcendant force that many call one God. He encourages skeptics and naysayers to at least take seriously the truth of what a God outside of as well as permeating all creation means, as opposed to the childish notions of a fussy judge noting what's naughty or nice, or an addled fundamentalist's blinkered creationism.

Beginning each part with a moving, eloquent analogy of a dreamer imagining what occurs parallel to what's actually happening outside his sleep, which is filtered into his sensorium as transformed, sets up a main text demanding attention, widening one's vocabulary, and presuming philosophical insight.

Therefore it may prove daunting to many, believer, seeker, denier, or wanderer. It could have been shorter. The "pleonastic fallacy" Hart often decries in his opponents' claims--too many words--enters these three-hundred-plus pages frequently, as the author shares this weakness. He digresses, and then catches himself over and over. Much of this resembles a sage's ruminations to an erudite fellowship.

I wonder who's the target demographic for this Yale UP publication. It'll never get the notoriety of bestsellers by his detractors, nor will it entice many believers unable to handle his dense forays into the history of ideas and the shape of theology which have enriched and warped this perennial theme.

I come to this matter as a fence-sitter, and I aver it's rewarding to hear out both sides in this long debate. How it may be settled may defy the evolutionary biology Hart detests, and the defections of many of the formerly faithful, or, who knows, the final secret may be found, against all logic or odds. Hart counters that God outside of the cosmos, the sole non-contigent presence in the universe, can never be satisfactorily understood by the nature of our limitations within our human mind and body.

However, Hart dismisses the "Just-So Stories" of the adherents to a reductionist materialism in a manner which tempts a mirror image of a empiricist who wonders how God can be grasped if essentially and existentially beyond the reach of human comprehension, as equally (?) intangible.
I am unsure how this argument will convince any who reject the simpler notions of a creator God similar to the "watchmaker" metaphor, or how "magic" ex nihilo which is never "quite" nothing itself can substitute for the discarded divinity, for "naturism" might be swapped for "belief" in crude terms.

Yet the value of the notes, and the help of his annotated list of further reading is welcome. He praises the atheist J.K. Mackie's work as a worthy foil; he recommends John Lennox's God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? as a primer to many topics overlapping with his own deeper examination.

I share some highlights, for in such a challenging project, Hart's own words deserve their place rather than paraphrase or summary which may distort his patterns of inquiry or dilute his concentrated prose. At its best, it will inspire many bookmarks and times for an attentive reader to reflect upon. Its shortcomings remain, and will be countered surely by his eager rivals, but it's a valuable investment in one's time, and I found myself staying up more than one night, curious about what came next.

"The human longing for God or the transcendent runs very deep—perhaps far too deep to be trusted, but also too deep to treat as mere primitive folly—and it has produced much good and much evil in human history. It lies at the heart of all human culture. All civilizations to this point have grown up around one or another sacred vision of the cosmos, which has provided a spiritual environment and a vital impulse for the arts, philosophy, law, public institutions, cultural revolutions, and so on. Whether there will ever be such a thing as a genuinely secular civilization—not a mere secular society, but a true civilization, entirely founded upon secular principles—is yet to be seen. What is certain is that, to this point, most of the unquestionably sublime achievements of the human intellect and imagination have arisen in worlds shaped by some vision of transcendent truth. Only a thoughtless person can possibly imagine that the vast majority of those responsible for such achievements have all clung pathetically to an understanding of the transcendent as barbarously absurd as the one casually presumed in the current texts of popular unbelief. We really ought to put such things away and discuss these matters like adults." What may escape notice is that Hart never tries to use his theories to prove a particular God or religious revelation. It's refreshing to find a non-Christocentric approach. He admits that God after all may not be founded on what we surmise as outside our sensorium, too. This appears to challenge his thesis, to say the least, but I may have missed some sly subtlety here.

"From the perspective of classical metaphysics, Hawking misses the whole point of talk of creation: God would be just as necessary even if all that existed were a collection of physical laws and quantum states, from which no ordered universe had ever arisen; for neither those laws nor those states could exist of themselves." Hart likes to go at the cosmologists who reckon that the quantum foam and random wave fluctuations from a vacuum spontaneously coming in and out of reality have always been there, prior to the Big Bang. He hammers home the simple denial that these are still created. I wondered why an eternal, recurring universe or set of such might be calmly suggested. But although Hart nods briefly to Buddhist contexts, he does not delve into their supposition. I was also disappointed that other Eastern concepts such as Dao did not enter this endeavor. He makes an aside early on that they may apply, but he will not incorporate or remove them from his central emphasis.

"And my final reason for using precisely these three words {of the subtitle} is that, so it seems to me, they perfectly designate those regions of human experience that cannot really be accounted for within the framework of philosophical naturalism without considerable contortions of reasoning and valiant revisions of common sense. They name essential and perennial mysteries that, no matter how we may try to reduce them to purely natural phenomena, resolutely resist our efforts to do so, and continue to point beyond themselves to what is 'more than nature.' Hart here shows his opposition to naturalism.

"Even if one could conceivably prove, as is occasionally suggested these days, that cosmic information is somehow ceaselessly generated out of quantum states, this still would not have decided the issue of causality in favor of the naturalist position. As a brilliant physicist friend of mine often and somewhat tiresomely likes to insist, 'chaos' could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws." Mentioned above, this estimation refuses to accept any "eternal" possibility.

"To use an old terminology, every finite thing is the union of an essence (its 'what it is') with a unique existence (its 'that it is'), each of which is utterly impotent to explain the other, or to explain itself for that matter, and neither of which can ever be wholly or permanently possessed by anything. One knows of oneself, for instance, that every instant of one’s existence is only a partial realization of what one is, achieved by surrendering the past to the future in the vanishing and infinitesimal interval of the present. Both one’s essence and one’s existence come from elsewhere—from the past and the future, from the surrounding universe and whatever it may depend upon, in a chain of causal dependencies reaching backward and forward and upward and downward—and one receives them both not as possessions secured within some absolute state of being but as evanescent gifts only briefly grasped within the ontological indigence of becoming." The "how" of the universe may be ascertained, but not the "why." That remains inaccessible to any discovery or test made by science.

Likewise, Hart gives no credence to the "strategy of avoiding the word 'God' only by periphrastically substituting the word 'universe.' In the end, ontological necessity is not a property that can intelligibly attach to any nature other than God’s. If one wishes to view the physical universe as the ultimate reality—whether one imagines it as having no beginning or as having a beginning without cause—then one must also accept that it is still an entirely contingent reality, one which somehow just happens to be there: an 'absolute contingency,' to use an unavoidable oxymoron. It may be an absurd picture of things—certainly there seems to be no argument against it more potent than its own perfectly self-evident incoherence—but it seems to me to be an absurdity that one can quite blamelessly embrace so long as one is willing to grasp the nettle and accept that this just-there-ness is logically indistinguishable from magic. Everyone needs a little magic in life now and then." Surprise!

"God is the infinite 'ocean of being' while creatures are finite vessels containing existence only in limited measure." Hart holds this is a frequently used image in spiritual works, but it's new to me.

"At that uncrossable intellectual threshold, religions fall back upon inscrutable doctrines, philosophers upon inadequate concepts, and mystics upon silence. 'Si comprehendis, non est deus,' as Augustine says: 'If you comprehend it, it is not God.'" So, what surpasses commonsense or speculation therefore comprises that which we cannot comprehend, but nonetheless, we by our senses say this? This reminds me of Thomas Aquinas' bow to mysticism, for all his texts were but "straw."

"The first-person perspective is not dissoluble into a third-person narrative of reality; consciousness cannot be satisfactorily reduced to physics without subtracting something." Hart doggedly insists that we can never get outside our own heads to truly explore the mystery of what our consciousness "is."

"What, precisely, did nature select for survival, and at what point was the qualitative difference between brute physical causality and unified intentional subjectivity vanquished? And how can that transition fail to have been an essentially magical one?" He nags at the biologists who aver that evolution can account fully for these leaps from animal to human within the evidence of the record.

"My claim throughout these pages is that the grammar for our thinking about the transcendent is given to us in the immanent, in the most humbly ordinary and familiar experiences of reality; in the case of our experience of consciousness, however, the familiarity can easily overwhelm our sense of the essential mystery. There is no meaningful distinction between the subject and the object of experience here, and so the mystery is hidden by its own ubiquity." God surrounds, if to us routine?

"If one is to exclude the supernatural absolutely from one’s picture of reality, one must not only ignore the mystery of being but also refuse to grant that consciousness could possibly be what it self-evidently is." Tricky. I guess that he reiterates the hard fact that we cannot figure out our own mind.

"The vanishing point of the mind’s inner coherence and simplicity is met by the vanishing point of the world’s highest values; the gaze of the apperceptive 'I' within is turned toward a transcendental 'that' forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two 'supernatural' poles." Within the book, this passage gains support. Maybe, that horizon is where God lurks, and where morals and what we yearn for rests by design.

"God is the one act of being, consciousness, and bliss in whom everything lives and moves and has its being; and so the only way to know the truth of things is, necessarily, the way of bliss." Late in the book, Hart tells us that without God, neither good nor evil would be present among us. I admit I remained unclear about this bold statement. Perhaps it's that God generates all that "matters" even if as conceived as mental constructions (aesthetics, love, truth, goodness?) rather than evolution itself?

Sometimes I felt as if Hart was hacking his way into thickets determined to strike down the biologists who advance the primacy of these "moral" conceptions as generated from our inner workings. He kept cutting down Daniel Dennett, for instance, but I wished he'd given his foe more of a fair hearing.

"Whether God is indeed to be found in these dimensions of experience, that is where he has traditionally been sought, as the unconditioned and transcendent reality who sustains all things in being, the one in whom all that nature cannot contain but upon which nature depends has its simple and infinite actuality." Hart encapsulates the central gist of his formidable repetition of this verity.

"We cannot encounter the world without encountering at the same time the being of the world, which is a mystery that can never be dispelled by any physical explanation of reality, inasmuch as it is a mystery logically prior to and in excess of the physical order." Hart repeats his immaterial worldview.

So "much of what passes for debate between theist and atheist factions today is really only a disagreement between differing perspectives within a single post-Christian and effectively atheist understanding of the universe. Nature for most of us now is merely an immense machine, either produced by a demiurge (a cosmic magician) or somehow just existing of itself, as an independent contingency (a magical cosmos)." Back to that magic he mocks in the materialists as the only fallback they have for the evolutionary leaps. A bit of the "god of the gaps" inverted against the fact-checkers.

"It is rather as if a dispute over the question of Tolstoy’s existence were to be prosecuted by various factions trying to find him among the characters in Anna Karenina, and arguing about which chapters might contain evidence of his agency (all the while contemptuously ignoring anyone making the preposterous or meaningless assertion that Tolstoy does not exist at all as a discrete object or agent within the world of the novel, not even at the very beginning of the plot, and yet is wholly present in its every part as the source and rationale of its existence)."" I liked this all the more as I just finished that novel. It assists those of us who at this rarified level of cogitation wait for an easier sussed idea.

He turns Marx inside out a bit next. "In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys." He's getting warmed up at the conclusion, encouraging contemplation to get beyond all this mental exertion, and warning us that without such committed endeavor, these distractions will dull us, and we will fail to make the necessary attempt to turn from the shadows and leave Plato's screened cave.

"If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some 'experimental' or 'empirical' demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve any sort of real certainty regarding a reality that is nothing less than the infinite coincidence of absolute being, consciousness, and bliss. In short, one must pray."

"Late modernity is, after all, a remarkably shrill and glaring reality, a dazzling chaos of the beguilingly trivial and terrifyingly atrocious, a world of ubiquitous mass media and constant interruption, a ceaseless storm of artificial sensations and appetites, an interminable spectacle whose only unifying theme is the imperative to acquire and spend. It is scarcely surprising, in such a world, amid so many distractions, and so many distractions from distraction, that we should have little time to reflect upon the mystery that manifests itself not as a thing among other things, but as the silent event of being itself. Human beings have never before lived lives so remote from nature, or been more insensible to the enigma it embodies. For late modern peoples, God has become ever more a myth, but so in a sense has the world; and there probably is no way of living in real communion with one but not the other." Preaching to me, a disenchanted and disaffected member of the late capitalist choir, this concludes Hart's spirited counter-cultural turn, where he encourages us to stay still. Few of us may have the privilege he does to live in hilly woods, but we can seek a better place to reflect.
(Amazon US 1/5/18 in much shorter form)