In the Guardian, Karen Armstrong reviews Marilynne Robinson's new essay collection, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self -- and finds herself musing on the intersection of science and religion in an unfortunately condensed space. A good review all the same. An excerpt:
Bypassing Donne, Bach, the Sufi poets and Socrates, Dennett, Dawkins and others are free to reduce the multifarious religious experience of humanity "to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death".
More significant than this jejune attack on faith, (Robinson) argues, is the disturbing fact that "the mind, as felt experience, has been excluded from important fields of modern thought" and as a result "our conception of humanity has shrunk". Robinson's argument is prophetic, profound, eloquent, succinct, powerful and timely. It is not an easy read, but one of her objectives is to help readers appreciate the complexity of these issues. To adopt such a "closed ontology", she insists, is to ignore "the beauty and the strangeness" of the individual mind as it exists in time. Subjectivity "is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts. And the literatures that would dispel such things refuse to acknowledge subjectivity, perhaps because inability has evolved into principle and method."
In the past, the voices that say "there is something more" have always been right. The positivist approach would not only marginalise religion, but also the arts, culture, history, and the classical and humanist traditions. Most prescient of all is Robinson's contention that "it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses."
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