Something Old, Something New

This book explores a significant if underappreciated relationship between religious and secular interests. In entanglement, secularity competes with religion, but neither side achieves simple dominance by displacing the other. As secular ideas and practices entangle with their religious counterparts, they interact and alter each other in a contentious but oddly intimate relationship. Each chapter focuses on a topic of contemporary relevance that shows entanglement at work. After brief introductory analyses of the “War on Christmas” and controversies surrounding stem cell research, the book turns to debates sparked by new atheism. Chapter 2 analyzes the rhetoric of new atheists, many of them scientists; chapter 3 conversely analyzes the rhetoric of faithful scientists who see no incompatibility between scientific reason and belief in God. The new atheists’ rhetoric reveals their subtle entanglement with religious discourse, even as they aim to supplant it. The faithful scientists present scientific arguments for belief in God, but analysis of their rhetoric turns up difficulties that jeopardize any simple convergence of science and faith. Chapter 4 examines the complicated relationship between canonical Christian works and the reigning secular paradigm in literary studies. In the next chapter, the Pope Francis’s secular-friendly positions mix surprisingly with his attachment to archaic, seemingly superstitious devotions. After analyzing the entanglement of Aquinas’s moral theology with contemporary cognitive science (“The Seven Deadly Sins”), the book concludes with “Psychedelic Last Rites”: recent experiments in psychedelic therapy for the dying share purposes and problems with the Catholic sacrament of extreme unction.