Dear Flannery,
I made a mistake in buying a book written by a couple of "interleckshuls." You spelled it something like that. Ha-ha.
It's really not so funny. The book seemed to hold such noble promise, especially with such a resplendent title as All Things Shining, and such an intriguing subtitle as Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. With our modern technology providing access to every book in existence, old and new, new and used, my money was winging through cyber-space with the touch of a few buttons on my computer and the book arrived in my mailbox in a few days.
Halfway through I have ground to a disappointed halt. I begin to see what university professors Dreyfus and Kelly are about. And it's too bad. Oh they begin very well by pointing out how our modern secular culture has become based on nothing, nihilistic, empty of purpose and meaning. They show how destructive this is for everyone and everything. They make a good case for how ridding the world of all things sacred has caused us to feel lost and sad. But here's the rub (meaning impediment--I've come to Shakespeare in my Lifetime Reading Plan and just finished Hamlet. It's rubbing off on me.) They totally misrepresent Christianity, saying it's all about Jesus' love being a "mood" which is something you can magically catch by "hanging out with him" (like the chicken pox?) that will make you want to, say, give your life for others supposedly like he did. What they mean by this is that Christianity is all about just being a nice person, which of course need not be a religious undertaking at all and in that case most of us don't need any Divine Redeemer. Strange, they don't seem to wonder why he gave his life. But it doesn't matter anyway because these guys later point out that Christianity won't do because it's all about "embodiment" and they want something abstract, outside us, something that transcends. Too bad they didn't do their homework.
Belittling and misunderstanding Christ in the midst of all their learnedness, these authors decide we should all go further back, B.C., to Homer's representation of the lofty ancient Greek polytheism. (Funny, in my recent studies I found that world clouded over with multiple gods and demi-gods who often thought and acted like flawed capricious humans with some superhuman powers dispersed among them, more like super-dangerous humans than gods.) I suppose the last half of the book is going to tell me why a new age polytheism is such a good idea. Ho-hum. Trumping up any old meaning to try and make sense of this meaningless secular world is not good enough for me. I wonder why it should be good enough for anybody.
It may be that they have been convinced that Christianity has to be false or lacking, so they don't bother to study into it in any depth. That's a popular view. And yet they admit it changed the world radically, like nothing else. Methinks these interleckshuls doth protest too much. It seems they must arch and twist and contort their cluttered brains for a way to avoid Christ, like a couple of bookish Hazel Moteses. Again, from Hamlet,
Their words fly up, their thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to Heaven go.
J.
