Religion & Literature 214 to elucidate Matthew Arnold’s view of “culture.” The upshot, that Dante “holds open the possibility that the imaginative contemplation of beauty may lead us however gently beyond itself to an encounter with what is real,” is well taken (150), but it would have been far more compelling had Wilson interpreted the poem, or even just a few of its arrestingly beautiful moments. Part III is concerned with truth and the ways in which “narrativity” and “rationality” relate to one another in its communication. Wilson thinks that the “conservative intellectual tradition” is distinct in not only “offering a narrative of its own,” but also in “defending story itself as the essential, unmatched means to knowledge about truth and goodness” (237). Here, Wilson defends the narrative form of the arts, against (post-)modern attempts to “liberate” art from the conditions of time and narrative, working through examples of the failure of those attempts to do more than make narrative “exogenous” to the works in question (256-57). In Wilson’s end is his beginning: the conservative intellectual tradition is the best hope for the recovery of the Christian Platonist worldview in which the vision of the soul is fundamentally ordered by, to, and from beauty to the recognition of a goodness and truth worth conserving and cultivating. Vision of the Soul merits the studied consideration of a wide audience, particularly those searching for a compelling case for conservatism, as well as those at the beginning of their intellectual journey. Students of literature, art, philosophy, and theology will find in Wilson’s Vision an insightful reflection on perennial questions besetting the human condition and a thoughtful engagement with some of the central texts that have informed the Christian Platonist tradition of inquiry into those questions. J. Columcille Dever University of Notre Dame Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology Vincent W. Lloyd Fordham University Press, 2018. 1 + 285 pp. $105 hardcover, $30 paperback. Vincent W. Lloyd’s Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology is a long overdue riposte to secularism’s encroachment upon the power of black theology. Lloyd joins a growing chorus of post-secular BOOK REVIEWS 215 scholars—notably Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood—whose investigations have unearthed the genealogy of secularism’s exclusionary management not only of religion but also of race. However, the book takes secular-minded critics, and black theologians, to task for allowing secularism to domesticate black theology. Malcolm X’s idea of the good “religion” of the field negro— the black masses in revolutionary struggle against white supremacy—thus becomes Lloyd’s starting point in resurrecting a black theology that takes seriously the oppression of African-Americans and all “blacks” (the weak, the marginal, the afflicted), under the “white” powers that be (the comfortable , the wealthy, the privileged). Lloyd contends that secularism today acts Much like the black liberal Protestantism of the Civil Rights era that succumbed to the bad “religion” of the house negro—the status quo of white supremacy—in bad faith as it co-opts black theology to make it speak on behalf of prevailing forms of multiculturalism and religious pluralism, but not to its most radical proposition: “God is black” (6). For Lloyd, “God is black” because God exists amongst all blacks, the poor and powerless. God’s blackness is antithetical to whiteness. Black theology, ergo, should renounce whiteness to truly worship God. Ultimately, Lloyd argues black theology must privilege the social criticism of white supremacy, as well as hold up the wisdom of blacks to reclaim a theological vision released from the disciplinary , secular logics of whiteness and oriented toward the liberation of all blacks by a black God. To do so, Lloyd defines black theology—and for him, “theology, properly understood, is black theology”—as “speaking more rightly and rigorously about God” (5, 6). To speak more “rigorously” identifies what God is not— whiteness. To speak more “rightly” articulates where God is—amongst blacks. Hence, Lloyd’s opening section focuses on various intellectuals— white and black, theological and non-theological—whose efforts to speak more “rigorously” and “rightly” come into tension with secular thought. Lloyd’s illuminating...
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Feb 1, 2019
Joas Adiprasetya 
Open Access