Paul J. Griffiths

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 pp. $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 »

Paul J. Griffiths The response of American Catholic intellectuals to the events of September 11 and their aftermath has been profoundly disappointing to anyone looking for some genuinely Catholic thinking. Most of what’s been written and said by Catholic chatterers on left and right is . . . . Continue Reading »

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought By Pascal Boyer Basic. 375 pp. $27.50 Pascal Boyer claims, as his book’s title proclaims, to have explained religion. What he means, in fact, is that he has explained it away. In making his claim, he enters his name in a long . . . . Continue Reading »

The study of religion as an academic discipline is now close to a century and a half old. In the United States, at least, it appears to be flourishing. There are scores of university departments devoted to it, several hundred doctoral degrees earned in it each year, a professional organization (the . . . . Continue Reading »

To be human is to acquire and maintain a habit of being. Such acquisition and maintenance requires, in turn, institutional forms. And at the end of the second millennium there are, worldwide, only three institutional forms through which enough power flows to provide translocal habits of being: . . . . Continue Reading »

Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia By Russell T. McCutcheon Oxford University Press 249 pp. $32 The academic study of religion is in something of a theoretical muddle at the moment. In its early days it defined itself mostly by contrast with . . . . Continue Reading »