Culture and the Death of God, by Terry Eagleton

In Terry Eagleton’s compelling narrative, three plotlines run concurrently. First is a parade of ideas from the Enlightenment to the present, displaying an awesome command of philosophy and literature while offering an absorbing study that highlights key figures and traces significant trends. Second is a sustained argument about the definition, influence, and extent of culture and about its role as a substitute for religion in the modern era; this a thoughtful, deft, and rich story, expertly told. Finally, there’s a burlesque apologetic for Christianity, which dodges the bullets of its demise by diving between the rocks of its inadequate replacements; here the polemic is suffused with irony and sardonic wit.

This effervescent trinity of story lines makes for a feast of erudition, insight, and fun. You must read Culture and the Death of God slowly, as much to check that you haven’t missed any references, inferences, or jokes as to underline the quotable lines so you can later pass yourself off as one who possesses a fraction of Eagleton’s scholarship and wit.

Atheism, it turns out, is not as easy as it looks. The story goes like this. The Enlightenment sought “to oust a barbarous, benighted faith in favour of a rational, civilised one.” It tore into religion, but it did so as a child berates a parent: it resented the power of the church, particularly in the political sphere, but it never imagined being without religion, and it had few ideas about how society was to be conceived or controlled if religion were truly to leave the scene.