Crisis Of Faith Research Articles

Thucydidean Answers to Nietzschean Questions: What is Religious?

Questions of nature’s role in politics — what constitutes a people, justice, necessity — thread together into a singular significant problem: what is religious? This essay begins with the aim of defining religiosity—to say what it is. Thucydides serves as an invaluable educator. With Thucydides’ History we can analyse human nature writ large: we see the rise of a people, observe their division, note the dissolution of their ‘ancestral’ and finally question the cancer of self-doubt that sets in as to the justness of their Justice — that is to say: their crisis of faith. But how to question Thucydides? The questions Nietzsche raised in his ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’ aremost relevant and revealing to the topic at hand. What is Religious? examines the nascent emergence and mature decline of a people, it strives to grasp the modus operandi behind it, it seeks a forward philosophy.

Guiding the Crisis of Faith

Guiding the Crisis of Faith

Messianic Movements and Failed Prophecies in Israel: Five Case Studies

This article examines several examples of messianic individuals and movements in Israel that have had to confront the failure of their predictions of imminent collective Redemption. These case studies suggest that individuals who expect Messiah's immediate coming, but who do not share this conviction with others, may experience greater freedom to reinterpret their prophecy and then proselytize a new vision of Redemption. When a small group's predictions are publicized widely and then fail, its members may find themselves facing a particularly sharp crisis of faith because of social pressure and may decide to abandon both the prophecy and group membership. Participants in large and diffuse messianic movements may become anxious when events begin to indicate that their predicted Redemption will fail, thus they are likely to adjust the prophecy and take steps to actualize it.

The Firmness of Faith in Times of Crisis of Faith

The Firmness of Faith in Times of Crisis of Faith

The Ethics of Belief

April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 188 Reviews 1 A.yW. Brown, The Metaphysical Society (New York: Octagon, 1973), pp. 180–1. THE ETHICS OF BELIEF Sylvia Nickerson History & Philosophy of Science & Technology / U. of Toronto Toronto, on, Canada m5s 1k1 s.nickerson@utoronto.ca Timothy J. Madigan. W.yK. CliVord and “The Ethics of Beliefz”. Newcastle, uk: CambridgeScholars Publishing, 2009. Pp. [x], 202. isbn 1-84718-503-7. £29.99; us$44.99 (hb). The mathematician William Kingdon CliTord (1845–1879) is generally remembered as a potentially great man whose life was cut short before his genius was fully realized. During his lifetime CliTord was well known in London as a public intellectual and noted authority on science. He was also an iconoclast , a leader in the application of Darwinian principles to areas beyond biology , and a proponent of non-Euclidean geometry. Unlike other agnostics, CliTord did not mourn the loss of his religious belief, nor did he worry that a secularized society would bring about general social decay. While other scientiWc naturalists worried that a collapse of religion would destroy morality and lead to social disintegration, CliTord willingly ceded the universal truths religion oTered, embracing the uncertainty that scientiWc knowledge actually entailed. He even dared to call himself an atheist. However, CliTord’s death at age 34 curtailed the trace of his thought. What remains is consigned to his scant private notebooks and collected works. Perhaps it was the brevity of his life that has led to his neglect within the history of science; no comprehensive appraisal of his mathematical work has been written. CliTord’sbest-knownnon-mathematical statementisthat“itiswrongalways, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insuUcient evidence.” This was the statement he defended in his lecture “The Ethics of Beliefz”, which he delivered to London’s Metaphysical Society in 1876. The Metaphysical Society, founded in 1869 to promote discussion between religious believers and scientiWc rationalists, ceased operation in 1880 after members could not Wnd enough common ground to begin debate. The rationalist position CliTord argues in “The Ethics of Beliefz” stands on the far side of the spectrum within this discourse. CliTord’s immoderate stance, along with his use of biblical rhetoric to argue a secularist position, was calculated to provoke conservative intellectuals and institutions.1 When his essay appeared in the January 1877 issue April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd Reviews 189 of Contemporary Review, it proved antagonistic enough that it led in part to the dismissal of James Knowles as editor. Timothy Madigan’s book W.yK. CliVord and “The Ethics of Beliefz”z provides an introduction to and analysis of CliTord’s ethical philosophy. His goal is to outline the historical context from which CliTord’s most famous essay arose, and to analyze the merits and demerits of its argument through the viewpoints of critics and freethinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Madigan gives a brief history of the Victorian crisis of faith, CliTord’s mathematical work, and the biographical details of his life. He presents the argument CliTord makes within “The Ethics of Beliefz”, and outlines the critical response from his contemporaries , including founding members of the Metaphysical Society William George Ward and Richard H. Hutton, poet Matthew Arnold, physiologist George John Romanes, and American psychologist and philosopher William James. Madigan also discusses the positions argued by other rationalists in the 1870s,1880sandlater(Leslie Stephen, Karl Pearson, FriedrichNietzsche, Charles Peirce and Bertrand Russell) and by modern philosophers who have contributed to the rationalist/religionist debate (C.yS. Lewis, J.yL. Mackie, Michael Martin, Peter van Inwagen, Susan Haack, Anthony Quinton, and Lorraine Code). In Chapter 6 Madigan presents his own defence of CliTord’s ethics of belief. While early sections of the book provide a helpful summary of previously published work, I found Madigan’s discussion of CliTord’s writings on psychology and theory of mind particularly valuable (pp. 58–65). Madigan notes positively that CliTord’s contribution helped steer the early development...

When Prophecy Fails? The Theology of the Oslo Process--Rabbinical Responses to a Crisis of Faith

The Oslo process began with secret negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and led to the signing of a declaration of principles by the two sides in Washington, DC in 1993. Israel agreed to withdraw from territories in the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria, and to establish a Palestinian autonomous authority in the area for an interim period, with a view to reaching a permanent settlement between the sides. This process, and particularly the territorial compromise it entailed, created a profound crisis within those religious Zionist circles that have identified Israeli reality as part of a process of redemption. The political concessions threatened to disrupt their messianic expectations and required a response adapted to the new reality. Accordingly, the Oslo process provides a test case for the way in which the religious Zionist public as a whole faced this crisis of faith, and, more specifically, the manner in which the Halachic guides of this public—those responsible for shaping its religious behavior—responded to this crisis.

The Dark Night of the Soul: spiritual distress and its psychiatric implications

The Dark Night of the Soul is an expression describing phases in a person's spiritual life associated with a crisis of faith or spiritual concerns about the relationship with God, and which has intrinsic aspects of spiritual growth. This paper is concerned with the way in which those going through periods of angst and disillusionment do not see them as pathological phenomena. On the contrary, through a process of attribution of religious meaning they view them as opportunities for reflecting on their lives and as agents for beneficial change. Similarities and differences between the Dark Night and a depressive episode are discussed and illustrated using the accounts of five important religious figures. Their narratives have been constructed using original texts and their biographies. The Dark Night has clinical implications owing to the risk of its being pathologised, serving as a reminder of the importance of incorporating existential issues into clinical practice.

Finding God in Wellworth high school: more legitimations of story-making as research

A curious piece of ironic, partially-dramatised auto/ethnography, this paper reflects an ongoing attempt to explore the vapid certainties of my own faith, some of the brittle discomforts of contemporary schooling, and the possibilities of a social science research methodology which can artfully assemble on the same stage belief, empirics and critique. Though actually too didactic to be art – and at the same time too casual to be social science – the paper supposes a set of incidents, based remotely on ‘actual’ events, which bring into collision some crises of faith, of schooling and of research methodology. I imagine that there is also some rather terrible humour to the piece.

Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite vision

This beautifully illustrated book accompanies a major exhibition of William Holman Hunt's work. It explores the nature and significance of the artist's vision and its relevance to modern audiences. Despite the great interest in Pre-Raphaelitism, it has been nearly forty years since the last exhibition devoted to Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the movement. His vision, which inspired the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, has lost neither its timeliness or relevance. The book illustrates paintings by Hunt and his associates, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Arthur Hughes, and also includes drawings, prints, photographs, decorative arts, costumes and archival material. It examines Hunt's work in the context of the Brotherhood, and his ideas in relation to the artistic, spiritual, intellectual, emotional and social crises of his age. By focusing on themes that remain relevant in the twenty-first century, the book sheds news light on Victorian neuroses, anxiety and the crisis of faith. Contributors include: - Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Director of Art and Visual Culture, Te Papa, National Museum of New Zealand - Jan Marsh, independent scholar - Linda Parry, Curator of Textiles (retired), Victoria & Albert Museum - Carole Silver, Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Division, Yeshiva University, New York - Nicholas Tromans, Lecturer, Kingston University, London - Joyce Townsend, Paintings Conservator, Tate Britain - Carol Jacobi, Associate Lecturer, Birkbeck College, University of London - Brenda Rix, Assistant Curator, Prints and Drawings, AGO - Katharine Lochnan, Deputy Director, Research and The R.Fraser Elliott Curator, Prints and Drawings, AGO

Religion and Medicine at the Crossroads: A Re-Examination of the Southern Rhodesian Influenza Epidemic of 1918

This article seeks to explore the nexus of religion and medicine in accounting for African and missionary responses to the 1918 influenza epidemic in Southern Rhodesia. Africans' explanatory models drew on a much wider sphere – sacred, social and biological – than their missionary and colonial counterparts, and their experience of the affliction led to an epistemological rupture in these explanatory models, resulting in a crisis in faith. Missionaries' explanatory models derived primarily from biomedicine, but missionaries were highly strategic in emphasising the sacred nature of the epidemic when it came to the possibility of African conversion. The ambivalence engendered by these competing explanatory frameworks (biomedical and African vernacular) would ultimately lead to a rejection of both in the form of anti-medical movements.

Sexual abuse perpetrated by Roman Catholic priests and religious

This paper is based upon an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which investigated the experiences of twelve people who had been sexually abused by Roman Catholic priests or religious. The premise of the research was based upon a perceived assumption that distinct forms of sexual traumatology generate unique trauma characteristics not accounted for within the existing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) conceptual frameworks (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems ((DSM-IVTR 2000;) ICD-10 R, 2007). Recent developments in psychodiagnostics to support the relevance of religious concerns where incorporated into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV edition (1994) which allowed a range of “religious” and “spiritual” problems to be explicitly identified as a focus for specific clinical attention. However, these appear quite vague in accounting for the range of trauma experiences experienced by this participant group. Evidence arose which indicated the majority of the research participants considered “God” to have been integral within the abuse, manipulated by design or default by the cleric or religious perpetrator. These idiosyncratic trauma characteristic created significant anxiety and distress in areas such as theological belief, crisis of faith, and fears surrounding the participant's own mortality. The IPA research identified six distinct, themed differences of which four will be discussed in more detail for the purpose of this paper. It will consider the attributes of these themes in relation to Roman Catholicism, celibacy and Canon law, and further question the sufficiency of the DSM-IV “V” Codes in accounting for the myriad of symptoms survivors of sexual abuse perpetrated by Roman Catholic Priests and Religious actually describe.

O Escravo de YHWH na História do Povo da Golah e sua Recepção no Cristianismo Primitivo: A Propósito de Dom e Dádiva Messiânicos

This research intends to present the Slave of YHWH in the context of the Babylonian exile and primitive Christianity. With no land, bread and Temple, there comes the anointed Slave, presented by YHWH as an emblematic being, dif fi cult to investigate like a puzz­le, and sent as a gift and donation. His Sitz im Leben, moved by an intense crisis of faith, in a geographi­cal scenery of draught and tombs, leaves no breach for seeing any hope. Therefore, the Slave of YHWH transmits no messianic signal before the Babylonian Empire. But what can we say about its laconic and fragmentary reception by the evangelists? Through the canonical narrations, we come to the conclusion that the Slave was not meant as an announcement of the Christ, not even including him in the Galilean itinerary of the Son of Man.

“Losing My Religion”: Sidgwick, Theism, and the Struggle for Utilitarian Ethics in Economic Analysis

Henry Sidgwick's loss of religious faith is central to understanding the origins of the Cambridge school of welfare economics. The most prominent “public” manifestation of this loss and its impact on Sidgwick's thought was his Methods of Ethics, which was at once the capstone work of classical utilitarianism, cementing Sidgwick's place as one of the great philosophers of ethics during the Victorian period, and the source of his deep-seated need for the very religion to which he himself could no longer subscribe. Sidgwick's studies in political economy carried this ethical perspective into the economic realm, though the major impact came via his influence on A. C. Pigou, whose welfare analysis was very much a restatement of the Sidgwickian view, but undertaken with Marshallian analytical underpinnings. This article discusses Sidgwick's crisis of faith and his subsequent attempt to devise an ethical basis for social life that was divorced from religious concerns yet consistent with his own more general theistic stance. It also shows how the results of this search affected Sidgwick's work in economics and, ultimately, the Cambridge welfare tradition.

God and the Political Planet

The resurgence of political Islam and the endurance of broad religious belief in the most modern of societies—America—has created a crisis of faith among secularists. If modernity no longer implies a secular outlook, and secularism, by definition, cannot generate any values beyond an indifferent tolerance of all belief, what role will religion play in the 21st century?In an interesting confluence of reflection, Jürgen Habermas, one of Europe's leading secular liberal thinkers, argues that secular citizens must be open to religious influence, especially since the very identity of Western culture is rooted in Judeo‐Christian values. In his political afterlife, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism and established a Faith Foundation to press for religious literacy because “you can't understand the modern world unless you understand the importance of religious faith.”Similarly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited secular France in September, President Nicholas Sarkozy scandalized the lay establishment by saying, like Habermas, that “rejecting a dialogue with religion would be a cultural and intellectual error.” He called for “a positive secularism that debates, respects and includes, not a secularism that rejects.”Despite the flurry of controversy over a recent spate of books extolling the virtues of atheism in the wake of Islamist terrorism, the more interesting issue by far is the emergence of post‐secular modernity.

Notes on Post‐Secular Society

The resurgence of political Islam and the endurance of broad religious belief in the most modern of societies—America—has created a crisis of faith among secularists. If modernity no longer implies a secular outlook, and secularism, by definition, cannot generate any values beyond an indifferent tolerance of all belief, what role will religion play in the 21st century?In an interesting confluence of reflection, Jürgen Habermas, one of Europe's leading secular liberal thinkers, argues that secular citizens must be open to religious influence, especially since the very identity of Western culture is rooted in Judeo‐Christian values. In his political afterlife, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism and established a Faith Foundation to press for religious literacy because “you can't understand the modern world unless you understand the importance of religious faith.”Similarly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited secular France in September, President Nicholas Sarkozy scandalized the lay establishment by saying, like Habermas, that “rejecting a dialogue with religion would be a cultural and intellectual error.” He called for “a positive secularism that debates, respects and includes, not a secularism that rejects.”Despite the flurry of controversy over a recent spate of books extolling the virtues of atheism in the wake of Islamist terrorism, the more interesting issue by far is the emergence of post‐secular modernity.

Faith in an Interdependent World

The resurgence of political Islam and the endurance of broad religious belief in the most modern of societies—America—has created a crisis of faith among secularists. If modernity no longer implies a secular outlook, and secularism, by definition, cannot generate any values beyond an indifferent tolerance of all belief, what role will religion play in the 21st century?In an interesting confluence of reflection, Jürgen Habermas, one of Europe's leading secular liberal thinkers, argues that secular citizens must be open to religious influence, especially since the very identity of Western culture is rooted in Judeo‐Christian values. In his political afterlife, Tony Blair has converted to Catholicism and established a Faith Foundation to press for religious literacy because “you can't understand the modern world unless you understand the importance of religious faith.”Similarly, when Pope Benedict XVI visited secular France in September, President Nicholas Sarkozy scandalized the lay establishment by saying, like Habermas, that “rejecting a dialogue with religion would be a cultural and intellectual error.” He called for “a positive secularism that debates, respects and includes, not a secularism that rejects.”Despite the flurry of controversy over a recent spate of books extolling the virtues of atheism in the wake of Islamist terrorism, the more interesting issue by far is the emergence of post‐secular modernity.

QUESTIONING SCIENTIFIC FAITH IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Abstract.The late nineteenth century was not only a time in which religious faith was questioned in light of increasing claims of natural science. It is more accurate to see the familiar Victorian crisis of faith as but one aspect of a larger historical phenomenon, one in which the methods of both religion and science came under scrutiny. Among several examinations of the status of scientific knowledge in the waning decades of the century, the treatment of the subject by the German theologian Wilhelm Herrmann and philosopher Hans Vaihinger rejected its objective nature and denied that either scientists or theologians had access to the truth of nature. Although this stance regarding the nature of science, religion, and their relationship was limited to intellectuals in German society at the time, it foreshadowed developments in our own day in which the traditional search for truth has been problematized.

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (review)

Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. By Timothy Larsen. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 317.) There was crisis of in nineteenth-century Britain, but there was also crisis of doubt, writes Timothy Larsen in last (and best) chapter of his revisionist account of honest faith in Victorian England (p. 239). Too much emphasis, he claims, has been placed on narrative of the Victorian loss of which more truthfully was no more and no less than a telling counterpoint in an age still dominated by religiosity in general and in particular (p. 1). He rightly complains of what he sees as a strong and deeply ingrained tendency in Victorian to separate religion any positive connection with thought (p. 3, emphasis added). For this, he interestingly blames, in particular, scholars from field of English or literary studies (myself included). According to Larsen, such people, at expense of historical truth, have been all too concerned with secularizing story of crisis of because such story seems to them more exciting, more dramatic, more honest, and, not least of all, more modern-in sense of being more way future was going to go. His main (and rather easy) target is A. N.Wilson, who in God's Funeral all too reactively denounced as dishonest seemingly every leading Victorian intellectual who maintained commitment to orthodox Christianity (p. 245). But real interest, even in Wilson, is when claims of cling on within skepticism distorted by its all-too-dogmatic attempt to disassociate itself genuinely free thinking. As Larsen himself shows, in some of his Victorian examples, result is often belated swing back to religion again. These reconversion narratives are Larsen's subject-matter. But what he does not consider is how far these to-ings and fro-ings are no more than dialectical mechanism of certain stage in history. That is to say: an inadequately conventional gives way to reactively self-congratulatory secularism that in turn breaks down to revert to half re-formed version of original creed. A better point would be not to see crisis of doubt as separate crisis of faith, but to take two as part of same phenomenon. Yet so interested is Larsen in his own revisionist counterposition that he only once makes this simple but vital point:The Victorians themselves frequently discussed and wrote about crisis of faith. …

The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (review)

Forging of Races: and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000. By Colin Kidd. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 309. $75.00 clothbound; $27.99 paperback.) Colin Kidd, known internationally as an authority on ethnic and national identities in Britain and in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century has produced a remarkably erudite book on race in the Atlantic world during the same century and after. By any measure, this is an ambitious book. Unlike related works that study the emergence of race science and secular racial ideologies during the European Enlightenment centuries only, Kidd, in the current book, focuses on tracing the entangled conceptual and historical relationships between race knowledge, ideologies of racialism, practices of racism and antiracism, and formations of transnational religious (specifically, Christian Protestant theologies) and social identities between 1600 and 2000. Forging of Races is thus remarkable not only for the historical range but also for the diversity of relevantly related conceptual problems it has successfully woven together and helpfully addressed. Because of its great reliance on extensive primary sources, the book's narrative and critical lenses transform our outlook on the relations between race, Protestantism, and international history of the modern world. It is divided into nice chapters, including a Prologue (Race in the Eye of the Beholder) and a Conclusion. Chapter 2 is the Introduction (Race as Scripture Problem) followed by Race and Religious Orthodoxy in the Early Modern Era, Race, the Enlightenment and the Authority of Monogenesis, Slavery and the Crisis of Faith, The Aryan Moment: Racializing Religion in the Nineteenth-Century Forms of Racialized Religion, and Black Counter-Theologies. Critical theorists of modern raciology will find extremely helpful Kidd's Prologue. In addition to revealing some of the most haunting primary sources of the emergence of, literally, heroic scientific efforts to produce racial classification, Forging of Races is most illuminating when it examines both the stubbornness of this science while exposing its racist contradictions. It is interesting, for example, to read about Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery's desire to produce a table of race-mixture in the French colonized island of Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Saint-Mery's biological science postulated that each of the races he studied was composed of 128 units of either white or black blood. In race-mixing, therefore, a mulâtre is a person who had 64/64 black/white units of blood while a Sacatra had 112 units of black and 16 units of white blood; a Griffe 96 black and 32 white; Marabou 80 black and 48 white; Quarterton 96 white 32 black; Metis 112 white and 16 black; Mamelouc 120 white and 8 black; and Sang-mele 126 white and 2 black. Kidd's strength is in showing how pseudo-sciences of race such as Saint-Mery effectively combined, on one hand, with larger secular ideologies of racialism and, on the other hand, ancient religious mythologies, most of them deriving from divine authority attributed to the Scripture, to generate theologies of race that supported the economic projects of transatlantic African slavery, the political projects of racial domination of particularly blacks in Europe, and the social policies of racial segregation in colonial America, Africa, and South Asia. …

Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief by Theodore Ziolkowski

Io98 Reviews Wien! (Vienna: Bohlau, I994)). Rose's publication contains a superb bibliography of primary and secondary literature, including what must be themost comprehensive list to date of Louis Huart's and Albert Smith's publications-a key to further re search into thenineteenth-century culture of entertainment and instruction. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER MARTINA LAUSTER Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. By THEODORE ZIOL KOWSKI. Chicago and London: University ofChicago Press. 2007. xii + 283 pp. $35. ISBN 978-o-226-98363-9. This book consists largely of a series of skilfully summarized descriptions of several European works, mainly fictionand poetry, ofwriters living in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth.The selection of authors and the literaryworks theyproduced is based on what Theodore Ziolkowski identi fiesas a common theme, 'The crisis of faith that shook Europe in the decades before and afterWorld War i and the responses that crisis elicited as individuals sought surrogates to fillthe spiritual emptiness in theirminds and souls' (p. x). He identifies five 'modes of faith' as surrogates for religion-'art forart's sake, the flight to India, socialism, myth, and utopian vision' (p. xi). The author avoids any systematic, persuasive philosophical reflectionon thehistori cal or ideological conditions in which the loss of faithexperienced by these individuals was embedded. He has focused primarily on thewriters as individuals, and the impact theymade on those around them, usually members of the same privileged literate elite,while glimpses of thewider historical conditions of existence enter only to that degree without which the creative genius of these fascinating, passionate, and often highly disturbed men (they aremainly men) would be comprehensible. These wider contexts are of course there in the narrative, for the experiences and cultural practices of these novelists and poets would be unintelligible without them. The wider social and intellectual history necessarily gets referred to as part of the recounting of thebiographical details, and in the summaries of thecontents and forms of fiction,poetry, autobiography, travelwriting, and aesthetic philosophizing. As one review succeeds another, summarizing thechildhoods, themarital problems, thepsy chological torments, the conversions and retractions, the fantasies, the trials, tribula tions, and pilgrimages of the subjects who form the objects of the author's smooth prose, much is said inpassing about the erosion of thegrip ofCatholic faithand tra ditional Church practice and authority, the development of capitalism, atheism and science, themassive shiftsof power exemplified by colonialism or Communism-in short theprocesses that tormented and confused the sensibilities of these individuals who sought theirvarious 'surrogates'. But the substance of thebook lies in the authors themselves, and presumably Ziol kowski at least hopes to encourage us to read them, a valid aim itself.But the reason for publishing must depend in part on the added lightwhich he intends to shed by bringing them intomutual proximity, not only in terms of their shared historical epoch, but also on thegrounds that theyexemplify themeanings of his key organizing categories-common loss of faith in religion, and thediscoveries and inventions of,or conversions to, surrogate faithsor secular analogies to religion. But what do all these words mean? A major problem with thispotentially fascinating and instructive book is that the author does not critically reflecton his key terms, all ofwhich are historically con tested. The reader can infer that by 'religion' he is generally referring toChristian faith,particularly Catholicism, though religion isattributed to thepre-Christian Ro mans and the highly questionable notion of a 'primal religious sense' finds itsway MLR, I03.4, 2008 I099 into the text (p. 3). By 'surrogate' he means a secular alternative to religion, though again themeaning of 'secular' seems to be taken forgranted as well; nor is itclear if this termmeans the same thing as 'profane', as in the chapter called 'Theologians of theProfane'. Thus many of the so-called secular alternatives such as socialism or aestheticism either look like religion or actually are religion. For example, one of the chapters is called 'The Religion ofArt'. On the other hand, much of the discussion about the attractions of socialism, national socialism, and Communism isconducted in terms of 'quasi-religion' (p. i I9), 'a substitute for religion' (p. i I9) or 'political...