After God by Mark C. Taylor (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 157 situation remarkably similar to that of almost a century ago;' that we are living in "the problematic reality of a world still disenchanted and of lives still unfulfilled" (238). These are all useful reflections on our moment in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but it only makes me wish more strongly that Ziolkowski had undertaken to write a more ambitious book on the topic. If anything, the "congeries of possibilities" (xi) opened up within the postEnlightenment era-what Charles Taylor has called the "supernova effect"-have grown more diverse and more distanced from the positions of various religious orthodoxies since the period Ziolkowski treats in Modes of Faith. The central problem here is also one of the most difficult, most pressing questions of our time: how do we recognize and affirm the continuing importance of (often diametrically opposed) religions in our globalized world and at the same time make space for distinctly secular commonalities built on political consensus, economic prosperity, and respect for human dignity? Ziolkowski's book sets itself up to provide genuine, historically rooted answers to key aspects of this question, but the argument never carries that far. And this is where the limitations of mere literary criticism become evident. Ziolkowski not only practices close reading like an artist of the form; he also doggedly avoids any lapse into theorization in light of his literarycritical conclusions. This has the effect of sharpening the clarity and deepening the complexity of his individual readings, but it comes at the cost of failing to offer his audience any real suggestion of a way forward in one of the great cultural quagmires of our day. One always wishes to avoid declaiming upon such a topic easily and with haste; but when one has done the research (as Ziolkowski has in spades), and especially when one has earned a respected place in the profession-the rest of us lose out monumentally by a reluctance to allow one's work to invite controversy in the process of making some bold claims that could set the tone in the dialogue that, for fear of stepping on toes, has not quite started yet in literary studies. Wilson Brissett Institutefor Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia After God. By Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ISBN 0-226-79169-2. Pp. xviii + 464. $35.00 Mark C. Taylor's sprawling and ambitious new book, After God, is one of the latest works striving to explain a modern world that did not, despite most predictions, continue to expand into secularity throughout the twentieth century. Taylor,who previously has relocated the God of classical theism to the postmodern cultures of LasVegas,Times Square, and installation art, now reaches back to Martin Luther and forward to theories of emergent adaptive systems to expand the concept 158 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE of God even further. An intellectual biography, a history of ideas, and an attempt at a comprehensive theology of culture for the twenty-first century, After God is composed of multiple mini-narratives that juxtapose different eras, ideologies, and disciplines. Taylor stitches together theology and philosophy with politics, art, and science, using the past to read the present and the present to read the past. Like Hegel'sPhenomenology of Spirit, After Godappears to be proposing a theory to end all theories and taking into account all of Western history as a demonstration of this narrative. In After God, as in earlier works, Taylor is aware of both his own intellectual path and its relationship to broader trends in cultural theory. For more than thirty years and in over twenty books, from poststructuralist philosophy to chaos theory, from the death of God to tattoos, from Melville to Madonna, Taylor has challenged the boundaries of theological and philosophical thought. Like the many charts and diagrams of ideological intersections and overlap that illustrate his latest book, Taylor's work proceeds by accretion. Rather than abandoning one school of thought (deconstruction) to move into another (the study of emergent adaptive systems), he piles them up, building links and constructing connections over time and between disciplines. In After God, we get the whole package: Taylor's...