Is That All There Is?
by James WoodSubtitled "Secularism and its discontents," this essay by James Wood is a thought-provoking attempt to grapple with the ramifications of secularism, which, he writes, "can seem as meaningless as religion when … doubt strikes." Though this piece is, in a sense, a review of an essay collection titled The Joy of Secularism, Wood's astute interaction with it proves him to be much more than another book reviewer — he's a critic, and he's precisely the kind of critic the religion world should be paying attention to. (Wood's polemic on the New Atheists is another fascinating read.)
"How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life-beginning with my own, my husband's, my child's, and spreading outward-is cosmically irrelevant?" …
These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one's own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.
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