http://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5926393/10-new-yorker-religion-articles-to-read-while-the-archives-are-free
Is That All There Is?
by James Wood
Subtitled "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.
