Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation. By Samuel Kimbriel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xiii + 224 pp. $78.00 (cloth).Friendship is a problem for modernity. We long for it, seek it out, celebrate it, and yet, as Samuel Kimbriel argues in this extraordinary book, we also suppress it, prevent it, and frustrate it. In Friendship as Sacred Knowing, Kimbriel argues that the often lamented, socially isolating aspects of modernity are bound up with often celebrated epistemological practices. Our ways of relating to and knowing the world have made it almost impossible for us to realize our deepest desires both to know and relate to one another, and ultimately to know, relate, and rest in the God who gives us and all others life.In chapter 1, drawing especially on the work of Charles Taylor, Kimbriel sets out the problem. Our modem, secular age is an era of extraordinary emancipation and achievement, but it is also a deeply aggrieved and alienated epoch, haunted by certain habits of isolation. Our liberal achievements and our social isolation are bound up with one another, Taylor and Kimbriel argue, not least because they are both bound up with the way we construct and distribute a series of culturally basic distinctions between inside and outside, mind and world, fact and value, and so on. Where our forebears tended to imagine these distinctions as porous and frangible, we modems have endeavored to treat them as fixed and given. This provides us with the familiar figure of both the disenchantment of the world and of the buffered or disengaged selves that inhabit the disenchanted world. In all of this, Kimbriel is a fine reader of Taylor, succinctly and elegantly rehearsing what Taylor often takes considerably more time to say. Kimbriel also brings out the easily overlooked connection that Taylor draws between disengagement from, say, a participatory or enchanted cosmos on the one hand, and personal disengagement from social relations, especially constitutive relations of deep intimacy, on the other. The isolation of Kimbriel's subtitle names precisely this disengagement from social relations that increasingly constitutes modernity.Kimbriel is, of course, not arguing that friendship itself has become impossible, but rather that it has been forced into its own quasi-private realm. By allowing the intimacy and vulnerability of friendship to exist only in a carefully delimited sphere, we trivialize and sentimentalize friendship on the one hand, but also intensify and magnify it on the other. This issues not only in the disengagement of the buffered self, but also in a whole set of attendant problems that destabilize and frustrate our pursuit of friendship. One such problem is the divorce between amicable and intellectual practices. Does friendship blind my eye and bias my judgment? As Kimbriel points out in chapter 2, such questions already vexed Aristotle and led to a tension with the Nicomachean Ethics. Indeed, Kimbriel shows that reflective thinkers throughout the ancient and antique worlds discerned but failed adequately to resolve this conflict between friendship, understood as the end of the virtuous life, and contemplation, understood as the end of the intellectual life. …