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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

ON THE SECOND COMING OF RELIGION

October 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

My essay on ‘The Myths of Muslim Rage’ sparked a debate about the relationship between religion and politics. Many challenged the idea that the conflicts over The Satanic Verses two decades ago, and over the Innocence of Muslims now, find their roots as much in political conflict as in religious belief. ‘Regardless of who may have been “pulling the strings” and for what reasons’, as one critic put it in commenting on the essay, ‘the fact that those strings can […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: alister mcgrath, atheism, charles taylor, darwin, fundamentalism, identity politics, islam, islamism, linda woodhead, marx, nietzsche, nilufer gole, olivier, paul heelas, religion, return of religion, secularism

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 14]: SARTRE AND THE ANGUISH OF FREEDOM

March 25, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism. ‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: aristotle, camus, consciousness, darwin, descartes, existentialism, free will, human agency, human nature, humanism, kierkegaard, marx, morality, religion, sartre

THE SEARCH FOR ETHICAL CONCRETE

March 29, 2011 by Kenan Malik

I gave a talk last week at a conference on ‘The Lust for Certainty’, organized by the Sea of Faith network. I enjoyed the event, especially Julian Baggini’s challenge to the very idea that the principal problem we face today is a lust for certainty. As troublesome as dogmatism, he suggested, if not not more so, is relativism and the refusal to be judgmental. In other words, the problem of lust not for certainty but for uncertainty (an argument with which […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: aquinas, darwin, death of god, enlightenment, ethics, god, julian baggini, julian savulescu, marc hauser, marx, nietzsche, religion, sam harris