Faith and Reason

I can't recommend enough that you download and listen to the 2008 Terry Lectures at Yale University delivered by Terry Eagleton (glamour photo above; you can find the lectures on iTunes by searching under "Yale University Terry Lectures).

They're the substance of Stanley Fish's much-discussed (and apparently much loathed by liberal Times readers) editorials on the importance of God Talk.

I do believe that the subject of Eagleton's lectures--a subject which he takes up with so much skill and humor--is the most important one of all for liberal practitioners of religion: why is religion still important when it's appears like such utterly irrational nonsense, even to those of us who practice it?

Eagleton answers this question with three major points:

1) Traditional religion as it has been practiced for 2000 years by much of the "institutional church" has done a dreadful job of giving people Jesus--it has been its own worst enemy. This is not a new argument--any knee-jerk liberal can cite chapter and verse of religion's historic abuses (from anti-intellectualism to patriotic idolatry). But where Eagleton breaks new ground is where he goes from there...

2) Liberalism--specifically the liberal notion of Progress (whether scientific or social or economic or moral), which was the great hope of the 20th century, has also proven to be susceptible to the same deadly and uncritical fundamentalism as religion. Rationality is only one sliver of a full and humanizing intellectual life. Healthy, sustainable human communities must be grounded in something more self-critical than political or economic theories have proven to be; theories never seem to appraise the deep and enduring flaws in humanity as well as does the Christian doctrine of sin. Liberalism keeps thinking we're better than we really are.

3) Christianity need not be abandoned... simply practiced. It seems to Eagleton, at its heart, to offer a path toward a truly self-critical, humble, anti-materialist approach to life that has been squeezed out in the hubristic capitalistic mania of the 20th century. In seeking life through the negation of life, finding victory in loss, finding power in a love that pours itself out, the Way of Jesus is a beautiful, irrational antidote to the liberal excesses of the Enlightenment.

You don't have to agree with Eagleton (although I found myself feeling delighted by his depiction of the weakness of liberalism and the virtues of the Way of Jesus--and this from a Marxist!). But you do need to let yourself drift down the intellectual current that he's charting.

The battle of fundamentalisms (liberal rationalism versus religious orthodoxy) is so boring and over.

The intellectual territory that I find the most fruitful and exciting is being charted out in the academy by people like Nancey Murphy and Richard Kearney, and in practical Christianity by people like Peter Rollins and my friend Bill Golderer and the Broad Street Ministry in Philly.

They're wondering about and experimenting with this basic question: can we be a post-rationalist, post-capitalist, humble, loving, embracing community of enemy-lovers?

The jury's still out.