|
| Christian news worldwide |
 Home |
 Archives |
 Subscriptions |
 Adverts |
 Find a church |
 About us |
 Contact us |
 Site Map |
 PrintableVersion Shelf lifeLooking at secular booksABSENCE OF MIND I hope you will remember the name. Marilynne Robinson is the celebrated author of Gilead, Home and Housekeeping, three novels which beautifully and gently depict the inner world of characters in small town America (consider that a plug). This, Robinson’s latest work, is actually four lectures delivered at Yale, where she was invited to give on ‘Religion in the light of Science and Philosophy’. Her sub-title is ‘The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Mind’. The thesis which underpins all four lectures is that positivism (in other places described as modernism which she associates with the rise of Darwinism and sees played out in psycho-analysis) in crediting science with the ability to understand and encompass all things, has reduced our understanding of ourselves as human beings. Her obvious target is Dawkins et al, though she doesn’t stoop to critique them; also she identifies ‘parascience’, the speculative attempt to reduce all human behaviour to strategies for passing on our genes. From this perspective, she says religion becomes ‘a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death’. And the mind is no longer mysterious, the self is a fiction, indeed, modern society has accepted that ‘we do not know our own minds, our own motives, our own desires. And… certain well-qualified individuals do know them’. The real weakness of these lectures is the failure to suggest an alternative. Robinson is not an orthodox Christian; though she is a sincerely religious person, she is clearly fearful of too much certainty. Thus, with no recourse to revelation, she can only protest that we are not machines, that the self is something more than a bundle of genes. Perhaps this is why the book has been so lauded by the Archbishop of Canterbury! I wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone. At points the writing is beautiful, though at other times it seems that Robinson obscures rather than makes plain. If you are conversant with some philosophy or if you have a real interest in the whole Dawkins project, then you will find this is an insightful book; I’ve certainly underlined great quotations (such as the ones above) to file away for future use. THE SLAPThe book I was going to review this month couldn’t be more different. I mention The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas purely to warn you against it. The reviews in reputable papers indicated that this was a great novel about cultural diversity in Australia, centring on the clash of worldviews exposed when a father slapped another’s misbehaving child at a barbeque. It is nothing of the sort. This is a book about casual drug use and sexual intrigue; I guess that is why it was hailed as culturally relevant. I skimmed half of it, then threw it away. Be warned. Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - August 2010 |
|
