* The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla

New York Times book review of THE STILLBORN GOD: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.

This Review, titled, “The Political and the Divine” by REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, September 16, 2007, "indicates that this might be an interesting work for those asking the question: Why are religions and gods still playing significant roles in our cultures, politics, and philosophies?"**

Excerpts from Ms. Goldstein’s review in the NYTimes:

"Some of us have been taking the European Enlightenment a little bit for granted. We’ve assumed that, just as natural philosophers like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler ultimately prevailed in overturning the geocentric model of Ptolemaic cosmology, so, too, moral philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke ultimately prevailed in removing ideas of divine revelation and redemption from politics. Progress in both spheres, the scientific and the political, was not only analogous and linked, but also, in some sense, inevitable, at least once rigorous standards of clear thinking were adopted. Let people freely and rationally pursue physics, and eventually they’d draw the conclusion that the Earth moves. Let people freely and rationally think about how best to organize human society — with a view toward diminishing turmoil and augmenting the realization of individual potential — and eventually they’d separate church and state. We’ve assumed the matter has been thankfully settled, at least in the Western intellectual tradition. No wonder, then, that recent years have brought a spate of incredulous “neo-Enlightenment” books — along the lines of Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” — all of them barely able to contain their dismay that they even have to be arguing what it is they are arguing."

"The sophisticated story that Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, presents in “The Stillborn God” adds nuance and complexity to the intellectual account we tell about the West’s thinking on religion and politics, and how it managed to separate (sort of) the one from the other. Lilla wants to challenge the view that the “Great Separation” — the prying apart of political theories from theology — was analogous to, say, the Copernican Revolution, that it constituted a discovery at which those thinking well would eventually arrive and that, once discovered, was secured in intellectual history’s linear progress."

"In Lilla’s telling there was, first of all, nothing inevitable about the Great Separation. In fact, it is political theology that comes most naturally to us: “When looking to explain the conditions of political life and political judgment, the unconstrained mind seems compelled to travel up and out: up toward those things that transcend human existence, and outward to encompass the whole of that existence. ... The urge to connect is not an atavism.”"

**Thanks to my friend, Prof. D. Showley, for his words and bringing this article to my attention.

Mark Lilla at Wikipedia