Anthony Kronman’s upcoming book, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan, looks to be an important subject for our times. David Brooks recently wrote about the important tome in his most recent column: The Beauty of Big Books. In his column, Brooks notes the former Yale Law School Dean’s journey toward understanding our modern world. “Since I first began to think about such things in even a modestly self-conscious way,†Brooks writes, quoting Kronman, “I have been haunted by the thought that destiny has placed me in a world with a unique historical identity and been anxious to know what this is.†Brooks is certainly correct in saying it’s a big book too. The volume comes in at more than 1,100 pages. Nonetheless I’m looking forward to reading it.
Here is the book’s description from the publisher: “We live in an age of disenchantment. The number of self-professed “atheists†continues to grow. Yet many still feel an intense spiritual longing for a connection to what Aristotle called the “eternal and divine.†For those who do, but demand a God that is compatible with their modern ideals, a new theology is required. This is what Anthony Kronman offers here, in a book that leads its readers away from the inscrutable Creator of the Abrahamic religions toward a God whose inexhaustible and everlasting presence is that of the world itself. Kronman defends an ancient conception of God, deepened and transformed by Christian belief—the born-again paganism on which modern science, art, and politics all vitally depend. Brilliantly surveying centuries of Western thought—from Plato to Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant, from Spinoza to Nietzsche, Darwin, and Freud—Kronman recovers and reclaims the God we need today.”
