|
| Culture and the Death of God
ISBN: 9780300206548
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Religion -- History; God; Enlightenment; Religion and culture;
In his usual engaging manner, cultural critic Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution) offers a tour-de-force survey of the changing relation of culture and religion. Moving from the Enlightenment-where the ideological power of religion is undermined by various philosophical forces-through idealism, romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism, he illustrates how various cultural forces-literature, for example-gradually replaced religion; by the time postmodernism eases onto the scene, he observes, "human history arrives for the first time at an authentic atheism," because people no longer feel a need to be redeemed. Why, then, the contemporary resurgence of religious fundamentalism across the world? Because, Eagleton points out, "religion provides a way of fulfilling certain emotional needs. and provides a degree of spiritual depth to otherwise shallow lives." In the end, he argues that religion's true purpose is to challenge the too-cozy relationships of religious institutions and politics and that a new configuration of faith and culture might arise if religions practiced solidarity with the poor and powerless. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Terry Eagleton received a Ph.D from Cambridge University. He is a literary critic and a writer. He has written about 50 books including Shakespeare and Society, Criticism and Ideology, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Literary Theory, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Why Marx Was Right, The Event of Literature, and Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America. He wrote a novel entitled Saints and Scholars, several plays including Saint Oscar, and a memoir entitled The Gatekeeper. He is also the chair in English literature in Lancaster University's department of English and creative writing. (Bowker Author Biography) |
