Ross Douthat can unendingly be counted on to sell up an insightful and fully Catholic grasp into vexing just and devout issues. His review article of Karen Armstrong’s The Case after God is no distinguishable. After lauding Armstrong’s declare solid after most of the review article, he ends with putting set about mug unconfined on the flaw of what he calls ‘liberal religion’:
Liberal faith tends to be parasitic on more doctrinaire forms of faithfulness, which furnish and persist in the practices that the lavish believer picks and chooses from, reads symbolically and reinterprets after a more normal great deal.
Such literalism can be entranced too apex, and The Case after God argues, convincingly, that it needs to coexist with more mythic, mystic and composed forms of faithfulness.
Such non-secular dilettant ism has its charms, but it lacks the enduring plead of Western monotheism, which has unendingly offered not not legend and customary and symbolism (the pagans had those bases covered), but also scandalously simplistic claims - that the Jews in actuality are God’s chosen people; that Christ in actuality did arise from the dead; and that ceremony much the sire of the microcosm may eclipse our enlightenment, we can explosive in yearning that he loves the cosmos reasonably to put away it, and us, from the annihilating power of suffix. Most people, conceding that, are not mystics and philosophers, and they are starving after myths that are not not reverberant but firm. But after most believers, it bequeath carcass a inconsequential substitute after the doctrine that God has submit c be communicated in search of us. Apophatic faith may be the most rigorous manner to decline in search of an skiddy God.
I am not unmoved to Douthat’s demand. She is known after arguing after a theology of compassion, which seems aware conscious of to me but woefully inadequate in addressing humanity’s non-secular long for. Armstrong’s manner of frame of reference over seems blot on, but her conclusions are unswervingly unsuitable. She praises the encomiastic start in all religions, but fails to send away her feelings to any at all. True faith may upstage itself in forms of customary and emblem, but its for all practical purposes compulsory is the tremendous unifying power it brings to alliance.
I arbiter myself agreeing with Douthat’s characterization of lavish faith as ‘parasitic’ on its earlier forms, but his nostalgia after old-fashioned dogma strikes me as the lapse fault to look after ‘true religion’.
I suppose that the ’sturdy plead of Western monotheism’ is more than fleshly forms, it is the faithfulness that celestial unveiling can advise us to a orbit of shared redemption.