Surrogate Transcendence: Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God
The enormous difficulty of locating a surrogate commensurate with the social, moral and political power of a departed Almighty is the provenance of Terry Eagleton’s bracing intellectual history Culture and the Death of God. Its central argument — that genuine atheism is both difficult and rare — seems at first blush a bit of wishful apologism, the death rattle of a proud but exhausted cultural model. After all, the diminishment of the sacred is no longer merely the overbold conjecture of an intellectual fringe element. And yet, by way of an ironically Darwinian feat of cultural adaptation, He remains alive and well — if, admittedly, much transformed.
Dustin Illingworth reviews Terry Eagleton‘s Culture and the Death of God.