I’ve been waiting for someone to write a good long piece about the phenomenon that some have named the New Atheism: i.e. the rash of books by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and others whose express intent has been to hasten the disappearance of religion as a cultural force. The article I wanted to read would have less to do with pushing back against the arguments in these books than it would with trying to explain the phenomenon of their collective appearance.

The most obvious question that this imaginary inquiry would tackle would be the question of timing: why did so many of these books appear all at once? (more…)

In today’s Guardian Ronan Bennett goes after Martin Amis for “The Age of Horrorism,” a nasty 12,000-word essay on Islam published in The Observer (The Guardian’s sister pub) last year. My take on Amis’s essay, written last year after the original article came out, is here. (A shorter version, published in the U. of Chicago Sightings series, is here.)

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagleton and Martin Amis, who now are both teaching at Manchester University. In a new introduction to his primer Ideology, Eagleton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of calling Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-part essay Amis published last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now published Eagleton’s response to the latest article, as well as Amis’s letter responding to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay responding to it. A much-shortened version was published by a U. of Chicago email broadsheet called Sightings. Since the subject has come up again, I thought I’d post the original version in its entirety below. (Warning: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduction of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic prerequisite of serious moral thought, and for good reason. (more…)

I’ve never seen the show, but Emily Nussbaum has my vote for Stuart Gilbert of The Sopranos. It’s like reading Martin Amis on Lolita, and with a similar point: caveat lector.

Sightings, an email broadsheet put out by the U. of Chicago Divinity School, has run my take on Martin Amis’s recent Guardian essay. I count myself a fan of Amis’s fiction, especially London Fields, but watching him follow Christopher Hitchens down the primrose Britcon path has not been thrilling.

UPDATE (Oct. 2007): Check out this page for the longer original version of my essay.