Clik here to view.
The great separation
This is the first in a series of posts responding to Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, published by Knopf. –Ed. In my view, Mark Lilla reproduces in a very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A cautionary tale?
The Stillborn God passionately asserts and defends the doctrine of separation as the solution to the threat of messianic politics. My position on the nature of this threat aside, the book was a lot of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The other shore
Developed and elaborated by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and others, the Great Separation dictated that for the purposes of political philosophy and political argument all appeals to higher revelation would be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A review in three parts
Part One: Of Bows and Arrows “The world of today is torn asunder by a great dispute; and not only a dispute, but a ruthless battle for world domination. Many people still refuse to believe that there...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The last prophet of Leviathan
It would be unfortunate if Lilla’s The Stillborn God got lost in the shuffle of the burgeoning industry of Theocracy Alarmists, Inc. (fronted by the likes of Chris Hedges, Kevin Phillips, and Randall...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The forces unleashed
Beware the passions, for their bastard issue shall return in the guise of a black-robed priest. Some such prophetic utterance springs to mind in reading Mark Lilla’s magnificently ambivalent The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Liberal Protestantism the key
I enter this discussion of The Stillborn God very late because by the time I was invited to participate I had already written a review of the book for London Review Of Books, and thought I should not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Political theology & liberal democracy
Professors who assign Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to undergraduates typically draw students’ attention to the part about how the nasty, brutish state of nature gives rise to political authority. As Mark...
View ArticleClik here to view.
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 post-Enlightenment tradition of theorizing about religion starting from an...
View ArticleSecularism and critique
I would like to add a footnote to Saba Mahmood’s excellent piece “Is Critique Secular?” I think it’s important to explain the power that an affirmative answer to this question carries in our...
View Article