Tag: christianity

REVIEWING THE QUEST

December 2, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a round-up of the latest reviews of The Quest for a Moral Compass. On my Books page are all the reviews so far. You can buy the book from the Pandaemonium bookshop in Britain and the USA. Jonathan Israel New Humanist, Winter 2014 There could be no more daunting intellectual task than setting out to write a history of moral thought from the ancient Greeks until now. Yet there is no neater way of combining philosophy, religion, intellectual […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: christianity, enlightenment, history of moral thought, islam, jonathan israel, kenan malik's books, marxism, morality, radical enlightenment, religion

A SNIPPET OF THE QUEST: ON NIETZSCHE’S GENEALOGY

September 23, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the last (for the moment) of the snippets I have been publishing from The Quest for a Moral Compass. Taken from Chapter 14, ‘The Death of God, the end of morality’, it discusses a very different history of morality to mine – Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. . From The Quest for a Moral Compass, pp 241-246 Beneath the light and the froth and the absurd self-regardof Nietzsche’s work lay an engagement with the most profoundly unsettling issues […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: christianity, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, nietzsche, religion, socrates

FAITH IN RUINS

August 31, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I recently visited Lindisfarne Priory. Set on Holy Island off the Northumberland coast (it was the Romans who first called it Insula Sacra), there is something quite otherworldly about the ruins. Part of what makes Lindisfarne so ethereal is that Holy Island is not quite an island. As Sir Walter Scott put it in his poem Marmion, For, with the flow and ebb its stile Varies from continent to isle At high tide, Holy Island is an island. But at […]

Categories: Photos • Tags: architecture, christianity, churches, lindisfarne, religion, ruins

THE DEATH OF GOD AND THE FALL OF MAN

July 30, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week to the Academy, a conference organised by the Institute of Ideas. ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. And yet, misattributed it may be, it is nevertheless a sentiment that runs through much of Dostoevsky’s work, including his greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov. And it does so because […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, aristotle, christianity, death of god, elizabeth anscombe, emotivism, enlightenment, greek philosophy, harriet martineau, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris, sartre, telos

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD

June 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna. It is part of a series of lectures the Foundation is organising on the ‘Enlightenment and its legacy’. . 1 No Enlightenment philosophe talked of the ‘Death of God’. The ‘Death of God’ is a nineteenth century phrase, which we know of today largely through Nietzsche (though it was not Nietzsche who coined it). ‘God is dead’, as he put it The […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: 1848 revolutions, atheism, christianity, comte, death of god, enlightenment, french revolution, hume, jonathan israel, locke, marxism, morality, nietzsche, positivism, racial science, radical enlightenment, reason, reformation, spinoza

WITHOUT A MORAL SAFETY NET

May 12, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the text of a talk about my book The Quest for a Moral Compass that I gave at the Glasgow Aye Write festival last month. You can buy the book from my Pandaemonium bookshop. For other talks that I am giving see the Events page. What can the history of morality tell us about the nature of morality? And about ourselves as human beings? Those are the questions at the heart of my book. And those are the questions […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alasdair macintyre, christianity, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, greek philosophy, greek tragedy, history of moral thought, holocaust, human agency, human nature, modernity, religion, sam harris, viktor frankl

THE MANY ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN EUROPE

March 2, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a I talk I gave yesterday at the LSE Literary Festival. My thanks to Arthur Bradley who also took part and responded to many of the themes I raised here and to Danielle Sands of the Forum for European Philosophy for organising the discussion. ‘If we in the West do not understand the moral depth of our own tradition, how can we hope to shape the conversation of mankind?’ That is the arresting final line […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: augustine, christian europe, christianity, clash of civilizations, enlightenment, equality, greek philosophy, human agency, ibn rushd, islam, larry siedentop, original sin, pelagius, religion, stoicism, universalism

BERTRAND RUSSELL’S CASE AGAINST GOD

February 26, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This week I gave my annual lecture to theology student at Bristol’s Trinity College on ‘Why I am an atheist’. It is always an enjoyable debate (though I doubt if any minds are changed). I have previously published my talk on Pandaemonium. So, rather than republish my talk, I thought I would publish instead one of the classic polemics against religion – Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Russell delivered it in March 1927 as a lecture to the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, bertrand russell, christianity, ethics, religion

CHRISTIANITY AND LIBERALISM

January 25, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Review of Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop (Allen Lane) Towards the end of this engrossing, illuminating book, Larry Siedentop describes a fourteenth century battle between two Christian monastic orders. The Dominicans and the Franciscans were mendicant orders, begging monks who had abandoned the comforts of the cloisters to preach among the poor, largely in response to growing disaffection about the Church. At the heart of the struggle between the two groups, Siedentop suggests, lay ‘Contrasting accounts of relationship between […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: ancient greece, augustine, christianity, equality, history of ideas, history of moral thought, human agency, individualism, larry siedentop, liberalism, original sin

FACING RELIGION’S DILEMMA

January 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the essay published in the International New York Times last month under the headline ‘British Catholics’ quandary’. They call it the Francis effect: the impact of Pope Francis in galvanizing the Catholic faithful. Since he arrived at the Vatican, church attendance has surged across the world, while, in his homeland of Argentina, the number of people defining themselves as believers has risen by a reported 12 percent. Not just Catholics but those of other faiths, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: anglicanism, atheism, catholicism, christianity, islam, linda woodhead, pope francis, religion, secularism

THE HAUNTING GRACE OF MARILYNNE ROBINSON

December 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Which book am I most looking forward to in 2014? Perhaps, surprisingly, Marilynne Robinson’s forthcoming novel, Lila. Robinson’s life and writing is suffused with religious faith, indeed with a strong-souled Calvinism (though, improbably, she tends to see John Calvin more as a kind of Erasmus-like humanist than as the firebrand preacher who railed against the human race as constituting a ‘teeming horde of infamies’). Her most celebrated collection of essays, The Death of Adam, she describes as ‘contrarian in method and […]

Categories: Culture & Books • Tags: calvin, christianity, darwin, fiction, marilynne robinson, pablo neruda, poetry

RELIGION’S QUANDARY

December 17, 2013 by Kenan Malik

My latest essay for the International New York Times is on the quandary faced by contemporary religious institutions, and the light this throws upon Pope Francis’ attempt to transform the Catholic Church. Here are the opening paragraphs and a link though to the INYT article (where it published under the headline British Catholics’ Quandary). I will publish the full essay on Pandaemonium next month. They call it the Francis effect: the impact of Pope Francis in galvanizing the Catholic faithful. […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: anglicanism, atheism, catholicism, christianity, islam, linda woodhead, pope francis, religion, secularism

WHAT DID THE GREEKS EVER DO FOR GOD?

December 11, 2013 by Kenan Malik

I have been publishing on Pandaemonium a series of ‘lost pages’ from The Quest for a Moral Compass, my forthcoming book on the history of moral thought, due to be published in April. In completing the book, I had to cut the original manuscript quite considerably. Much of what has been lost is better off left on the cutting room floor. There are, however, some sections coherent enough to be worth reading. Previous such ‘lost pages’ included abandoned sections on Machiavelli, Descartes, John Locke, Greek cynics, atomists, skeptics and […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aristotle, christianity, evil, god, greek philosophy, morality, plato, religion, socrates, st paul, unmoved mover

SATAN’S WORK [GOD AND EVIL, PART 2]

October 16, 2013 by Kenan Malik

This is the second part of my essay on ‘God and evil’, exploring the problem of evil for Christianity and other monotheistic religions. The first part, which I published on Sunday, looked at the question of Original Sin. This second part examines the idea of Satan, and the tension in monotheistic religions between the idea that God is a necessary bulwark against evil (‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’) and the fact that belief in God leads many to accept […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: augustine, bible, blake, book of job, christianity, dostoevsky, evil, free will, god, hell, judaism, original sin, religion, richard swinburne, satan

GOD AND EVIL

October 13, 2013 by Kenan Malik

No, not a screed on the evils of religion, but an exploration of how monotheistic faiths (and Christianity in particular) account for evil in the world. It is another in the ‘Lost Pages’ series – sections of The Quest for a Moral Compass, my book on the global history of ethics, that I had to cut from the final version for reasons of space. Previous excerpts were on Machiavelli, Descartes, Locke and Greek cynics, skeptics, atomists and relativists. Since this extract is long, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History of moral thought, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: augustine, bible, book of job, christianity, evil, free will, god, original sin, religion, satan