Francis Ford Coppola has made Eliade whole again. He has given him back to us. Youth Without Youth is a…
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Deciphered by means of a perfected computer
Seen with a genealogical eye, Youth Without Youth speaks to the sheer danger of the sacred as the robust object…
The rules of the games
The Stillborn God begins as a book about two chess games. Part of the book explains, in all too cursory…
The persistence of memory
Francis Ford Coppola’s rendition of Mircea Eliade’s novel Youth Without Youth opens with a montage of clocks woozily bending. These…
The burden of the great divide
With the prevalence of voices casting doubts and aspersions on the so-called secularization thesis, we might imagine that the familiar…
Going beyond
One of the main arguments of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is that people, at least modern secular Westerners, have…
Two books, oddly yoked together
Mark Lilla's The Stillborn God feels like two books, oddly yoked together. One is a fascinating study, which traces a…
Political theology & liberal democracy
The idea of modern liberalism depends decisively on a jettisoning of theology as a source for arguing about politics: If…
Liberal Protestantism the key
Lilla alludes to the fact that “in the Anglo-American orbit, a liberal theological outlook could grow up alongside a liberal…
A case of heteronomous thinking
As a story, A Secular Age rivals Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (which curiously it ignores) and…