Book Review – The New Modern

Religion poisons everything… God is a delusion… the end of faith… these are phrases lately found among the burgeoning supply of books by “new atheists” who take arms against a sea of holy rollers and jihadis. In an age of faith-based politics, resurgent creationism, and religious terrorism, aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have become bestselling authors.

A new book attempts to take a stand against both the religious fundamentalists and their militant atheist foes. The Case for God is a landmark work of intellectual and theological history by the renowned scholar of religion Karen Armstrong.

The book is nothing less than a comprehensive history of human religion in just over three hundred pages. From painted traces of Paleolithic hunter-shamans on the Lascaux Cave walls to hip postmodernist theology, Armstrong offers a lucid narrative of humanity’s relationship with the divine. In her telling, the story of God and man unrolls like an ancient tapestry richly embroidered with scholarly insights and references from the world’s many religious traditions.

It is a compelling story, but it isn’t clear that many people—secularists or religionists—will find it persuasive.

Read the rest of my review of The Case for God at The Book Studio.

Pops, Terry Teachout‘s new biography of Louis Armstrong, gets a rave review in the New York Times:

Louis Armstrong, a k a Satchmo, a k a Pops, was to music what Picasso was to painting, what Joyce was to fiction: an innovator who changed the face of his art form, a fecund and endlessly inventive pioneer whose discovery of his own voice helped remake 20th-century culture.

His determination to entertain and the mass popularity he eventually achieved, coupled with his gregarious, open-hearted personality, would obscure the magnitude of his achievement and win him the disdain of many intellectuals and younger colleagues, who dismissed much of what he did after 1929 as middlebrow slumming, and who even mocked him as a kind of Uncle Tom.

The full review of Pops by Michiko Kakutani is well worth reading. This is a book about a great musician and performer, but it’s also a story about race, American history and identity, and the nature of genius.

* * *

Hear Teachout read from the book–passages on Armstrong’s love for marijuana and his bold denunciations of segregation–in this Vanity Fair “Writers Reading” podcast.

* * *

And enjoy this 1956 performance in London… “Mack the Knife.”

Tag: Book Review

Karen Armstrong’s Case for God

Louis Armstrong: Terry Teachout’s stirring new biography of the jazz icon