Betwixt and Between Christ and Marx: A Review of Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate by Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press, 2009)
Terry Eagleton is widely regarded as one of Britain’s leading literary critics. Currently Bailrigg Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster and Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway, he has been Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and John Edward Taylor Professor of English at Manchester University. Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and After Theory (2003) are three of the more than forty books he has published. His latest book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, is based on the Terry Lectures delivered at Yale University in 2008. Eagleton has been invited to give the Gifford Lectures in March 2010, their title, “The God Debate,”
Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate is a bold and provocative book, elegantly written, witty and at times outré. For the general reader it provides a useful introduction to the God Debate, the ongoing acrimonious battle between the “New Atheists” and their opponents. It is polemical and guaranteed to offend just about everyone who reads it. The book provides a thoroughgoing critique of secular humanism, liberal rationalism, post-modernism, neo-liberalism and global capitalism. Eagleton opposes his own “tragic humanism” to the “liberal humanism” of two high profile atheists: Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great. How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007) he conflates as “Ditchkins.”
