Paul J. Griffiths

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart Yale, 249 pages, $28 At the center of David Bentley Hart’s brilliant new book is an account of the Christian revolution, by which he means the gradual but radical and dramatic replacement of the . . . . Continue Reading »

In May, Steven Pinker published in the New Republic a jeremiad against dignity as a tool of thought in bioethics. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, works at the interface of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and psychology. He is, like most of that kind of psychologist, a . . . . Continue Reading »

His Illegal Self by Peter Carey Knopf, 288 pages, $24.95 His Illegal Self is Peter Carey’s tenth novel. Two earlier ones, Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious and lucrative award for writers of fiction in English. Apart . . . . Continue Reading »

Saturday by Ian McEwan Doubleday, 304 pp., $26. Ian McEwan’s Saturday is his eighth novel, and perhaps his finest. It tells the story of a single Saturday, in early 2003, in the life of Henry Perowne, a prosperous and successful London neurosurgeon approaching fifty. Perowne is married to a . . . . Continue Reading »

The Future of Religion by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo Columbia University Press, 112 pp. $24.50 The Future of Religion is the perfect primer in post-metaphysical historicism: it’s short, it’s clear, it’s repetitive, and it leaves no doubt at all as to its central purpose and . . . . Continue Reading »

Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions by joseph cardinal ratzinger ignatius. 290 pages. $15.95. May a religion other than Christianity serve as a means of salvation? May salvation be separated from the work of Jesus Christ? What may properly be said about faithful . . . . Continue Reading »

Paul J. Griffiths The intense debate in the United States since September 11 about the meaning, history, and contemporary applicability of just war theory”much of it conducted in the pages of First Things”has been instructive and for the most part at a high level of conceptual and ethical . . . . Continue Reading »

The current condition of cultural theory should evoke Christian pity and concern. Cultural theorists today lack the theoretical resources necessary for interesting intellectual work; and they are nostalgic for a lost golden age (the 1960s and some of the ’70s) in which those resources seemed to be . . . . Continue Reading »

Stanley Hauwerwas and Paul J. Griffiths Jean Bethke Elshtain is rightly admired for her courage, for her trenchant critiques of peculiarly American pathologies, and for the wisdom of her political judgment. We think, however, that her current attempt morally to justify the Bush presidency’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Part I: Paul J. Griffiths Proselytism is a topic enjoying renewed attention in recent years. This is largely because it is increasingly obvious that religious commitments and conflicts are and will remain central to the reconfiguration of global politics that began in 1989. Understanding the . . . . Continue Reading »