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+--- Thread: "When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik (/showthread.php?tid=164660)
"When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik - $tevie - 03-01-2014
Interesting article about a topic that tends to come back to this forum again and again. I enjoyed reading it and hope some of you do, too.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2014/02/17/140217crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all
Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man, asked to explain the origin of God, admits that early humans first adored “a guy in our village named Phil, and for a time we worshipped him.” Phil “was big, and mean, and he could break you in two with his bare hands!” One day, a thunderstorm came up, and a lightning bolt hit Phil. “We gathered around and saw that he was dead. Then we said to one another, ‘There’s something bigger than Phil!’ ”
...
It is not an accident that the crucial moment of voting in the British Parliament is called a “division.” Our politics are a mirror not of our similarities but of our differences. That’s why they’re politics. We were less divided than our politics made us seem right on the brink of the Civil War, too. We were just divided on one big point. And the big point that divides us now is that the Super-Naturalists don’t want only to be reassured that they can say their prayers as much as they like to whomever they like. They also want recognition from the people they feel control the culture that theirs is an honored path to truth—they want Super-Naturalism to be respected not just as a way of living but as a way of knowing.
Re: "When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik - Chakravartin - 03-02-2014
A third of the way down before he reveals that his incoherent stream of consciousness writing is some sort of book review.
Weird.
Re: "When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik - $tevie - 03-02-2014
New Yorker book reviews are usually more of a "discussion fostered by the following books" sort of essay rather than a book review per se.
I find your description of an incoherent stream of consciousness completely disconcerting. You don't happen to think he is a Christian and hence automatically decided not to read it, did you? Adam Gopnik is a fairly prominent American writer and many many people have a lot of good things to say about his work. Including me. His New Yorker articles are always worth reading.
Re: "When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik - Chakravartin - 03-02-2014
$tevie wrote:
I find your description of an incoherent stream of consciousness completely disconcerting. You don't happen to think he is a Christian and hence automatically decided not to read it, did you?
Ummm... No. It's pretty clear that if he's not an outright humanist he's worshipful of the idea of humanism.
My problem is with his writing style.
There's little cohesiveness and no real follow through on what appears to be his thesis, but is in hindsight part of a criticism that he doesn't elaborate on until far down the page when he finally derides the author as a chronicler of ideas rather than a seeker for their meaning. And then he proceeds to chronicle a bunch of ideas in a seemingly similar fashion, elaborating only on results, not meaning and motivation: Religious expression gives atheists and humanists the warm fuzzies. Oooooookay. What binds all of these things together and is this something that we can take and use to enhance our lives?
I think that he could have written a better review in three paragraphs and left the rest for the speculation of secondary characters in a novel.
I don't enjoy this style of writing.
Re: "When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik - Chakravartin - 03-02-2014
...But I do enjoy that he got me thinking about some of this stuff.
Thank you for posting it.
Re: "When did faith start to fade?" by Adam Gopnik - $tevie - 03-02-2014
Okie dokie. Sorry it's not to your taste.