In his New York Times blog, Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution, a book whose indictment of liberal rationalism in general, and New Atheists in particular, Fish generally endorses:
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment—these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition—an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary)—because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.
Read the entire piece here. Read Nathan Schneider‘s take on Eagleton’s book at the American Prospect.
Daniel Vaca is the Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University, where he teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. A historian of religion and culture in North America, he specializes in the relationship between religious and economic activity in the United States. His first book, Evangelicals Incorporated: Books and the Business of Religion in America (Harvard, 2019) examines how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial strategy and corporate initiative. The co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's program unit on Religion and Economy, Daniel serves on the editorial board of The Immanent Frame.
