I'm not sure if this is an appropriate way to draw attention to a topic, but humanities professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University has an essay in the NYT adapted from his soon to be published book titled "The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West."
If the essay is any indication, I'm confident his book will be indespensible reading. Prof. Lilla's erudite essay explores the fundamental political challenges posed by institutionalized religion and political theology. He concisely lays down the historical intersections and cross-currents of political and religious thought and the influential thinkers and actors who shaped our current reality. He suggests a modern world that is both anti-modern and one not easily "renovated"--at least not anytime soon. He points to possible allies and fleshes out both new and old paradigms to understanding and possible paths to reconcilliation between the political and religious. The essay is both hopeful and frightening in its implications.
Lilla's essay is long but easily digested. Hopefully enough Kossacks take the time and it will spark some truly interesting discussion. Here's a few little tidbits:
We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
It is an unnerving tale, one that raises profound questions about the fragility of our modern outlook. Even the most stable and successful democracies, with the most high-minded and civilized believers, have proved vulnerable to political messianism and its theological justification. If we can understand how that was possible in the advanced West, if we can hear political theology speaking in a more recognizable tongue, represented by people in familiar dress with familiar names, perhaps then we can remind ourselves how the world looks from its perspective. This would be a small step toward measuring the challenge we face and deciding how to respond.
It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as Hobbes wrote, to "men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek." Pitiful, but understandable.
They disagreed with one another, and because their very souls were at stake, they fought. Which led to wars; which led to more fear; which made people more religious; which. . . .
The children of Rousseau followed a different line of argument. Medieval political theology was not salvageable, but neither could human beings ignore questions of eternity and transcendence when thinking about the good life. When we speculate about God, man and world in the correct way, we express our noblest moral sentiments; without such reflection we despair and eventually harm ourselves and others. That is the lesson of the Savoyard vicar.
Hope I didn't break any fair use rules with five blockquotes. If I did someone will let me know.