Jeune Street

Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton's new book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution (Yale UP):

The fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of "the telescope and the microscope" religion "no longer offers an explanation of anything important," Eagleton replies, "But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It's rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov."

The analogy between literature and religion is a useful one, as it conveys (in part) what religion is about using secular language. For most people around the world (extremists aside), religion is about grappling with the unknown, seeking truth in an apparently arbitrary world, and trying desperately to become something better than what we are. Aren't those among the themes of great literature?