Reviewed by: Richard Coles

Both friends and foes of the Church of England might think that the title of this book, Religion for Atheists, is one we’ve already claimed. We set a low hurdle, it is said, which many sceptics clear with ease, and once over they seem to find the tentativeness of our enthusiasms, the Gwen John palette of our prayer, if not exactly congenial, then not unpleasant.Alain de Botton might belong to this group, were it not for this, in the first chapter: “Let us state that of course no religions are true in any God-given sense.” That he should reach his conclusion so confidently and so early on would, you’d think, spare him the effort of engaging seriously with religion and spare us the effort of reading the rest of the book. He does persevere, however, and so should we, for our efforts are rewarded. His prose is lovely: clear, gently persuasive, light of touch – he would have made a marvellous preacher – and the text is illustrated with helpful photographs suggesting, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, that the truth is best told slant.

It is a great relief, also, to come across a book with the word “atheists” in the title that responds to the claims of religion and its adherents with something more than an attack of the vapours. Others, more hostile in intent, leave their readers with the impression that affiliation to a church is equivalent to, say, participating actively in the Spanish Inquisition. De Botton, in welcome contrast, concedes that religion might not only be benign but also offer things of value for all. In my little town, for example, if you are old and alone, church and chapel between them provide daily amusements, solidarity with one’s peers, contact with the young, practical support and help and a fathomless wealth of biscuits. Seven centuries ago, in this unremarkable part of the English Midlands, the town folk built a church so beautiful that it gave shape to their hopes of a life transcending this worldly weal and woe – a function that it continues to perform today.

De Botton suggests that these modest examples are derived from religious faith and commitment, powerful stuff, which on a wider scale have enabled liberal education to flourish, societies to cohere, and individuals to engage with one another in peculiarly rich and successful ways. He rather interestingly contrasts going out to eat in a restaurant with the Eucharist. The former gathers people in a convivial setting to eat together only for them to pretend that they are in fact alone, sitting there in isolating pools of light whispering to one another over their sea bass. The latter, originally a shared meal, turns strangers into brothers and sisters through the practice of what theologians call koinonia – communion through participation. This is not to say that De Botton is unmindful of the yawning chasm between what religious people hope to do and what they actually achieve, but he does think that there is credit in having a go.

For these, and other reasons, De Botton urges his readers not to ignore or scorn religion but to steal from it. We may no longer feel the need to profess extraordinary beliefs and circumcise our boy children but we could all use a revived sense of community, an enlivening of our sympathies, and a strengthening of our powers to enjoy or endure existence. He recommends, for example, the erection of temples to secular virtues, structures – like mosques or Stonehenge or St Mary the Virgin, Finedon – in which our values and aspirations are “solidified and celebrated”. That makes sense, and some illustrations are provided; but to me – and here is where we part company – they look like pavilions from a minor Baltic expo. Could a Temple of Reflection or Campanile of Perspective or Henge of Higgs Bosons ever do for us what Lincoln Cathedral or the Al-Azhar mosque did for our ancestors? I do not think so, because they do not have the same designs on us, body and soul. In these secular temples our deepest longings and fears may indeed be “mirrored and contextualised” but they are not redeemed.

I think I share a secular person’s sense of awe and wonder at a starlit sky or a subatomic particle behaving ambiguously; I too find deep consolation in the sublime indifference of nature – the one thing that makes me feel nostalgic for atheism – but Christianity does not offer consolation, it offers salvation. That is why people built cathedrals, and in other dispensations enormous mosques and complexes of temples: they sought, and seek, salvation, and for this God‑givenness seems to me essential.

This article originally appeared on The Observer.

The following review originally appeared on

Krauss, Lawrence M. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Free Press, 2012

Reviewed by David Albert

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story. I kid you not. Look at the subtitle. Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

Well, let’s see. There are lots of different sorts of conversations one might want to have about a claim like that: conversations, say, about what it is to explain something, and about what it is to be a law of nature, and about what it is to be a physical thing. But since the space I have is limited, let me put those niceties aside and try to be quick, and crude, and concrete.

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

Never mind. Forget where the laws came from. Have a look instead at what they say. It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and allthere is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” – the laws of relativistic quantum field theories – are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on – and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

What on earth, then, can Krauss have been thinking? Well, there is, as it happens, an interesting difference between relativistic quantum field theories and every previous serious candidate for a fundamental physical theory of the world. Every previous such theory counted material particles among the concrete, fundamental, eternally persisting elementary physical stuff of the world – and relativistic quantum field theories, interestingly and emphatically and unprecedentedly, do not. According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain ­arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being 276 particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being an infinite number of particles, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. And he has an argument – or thinks he does – that the laws of relativistic quantum field theories entail that vacuum states are unstable. And that, in a nutshell, is the account he proposes of why there should be something rather than nothing.

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states – no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems – are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields – what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings – if you look at them aright – amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

Krauss, mind you, has heard this kind of talk before, and it makes him crazy. A century ago, it seems to him, nobody would have made so much as a peep about referring to a stretch of space without any material particles in it as “nothing.” And now that he and his colleagues think they have a way of showing how everything there is could imaginably have emerged from a stretch of space like that, the nut cases are moving the goal posts. He complains that “some philosophers and many theologians define and redefine ‘nothing’ as not being any of the versions of nothing that scientists currently describe,” and that “now, I am told by religious critics that I cannot refer to empty space as ‘nothing,’ but rather as a ‘quantum vacuum,’ to distinguish it from the philosopher’s or theologian’s idealized ‘nothing,’ ” and he does a good deal of railing about “the intellectual bankruptcy of much of theology and some of modern philosophy.” But all there is to say about this, as far as I can see, is that Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right. Who cares what we would or would not have made a peep about a hundred years ago? We were wrong a hundred years ago. We know more now. And if what we formerly took for nothing turns out, on closer examination, to have the makings of protons and neutrons and tables and chairs and planets and solar systems and galaxies and universes in it, then it wasn’t nothing, and it couldn’t have been nothing, in the first place. And the history of science – if we understand it correctly – gives us no hint of how it might be possible to imagine otherwise.

And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong – or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things – it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world – and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

David Albert is a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience.

Reviewed by Bhrigupada Dasa (Dr. Måns Broo)

At the confluence of the Saraswati, Yamuna, and Ganges rivers at Prayaga, two aging men meet in great happiness. They grew up as friends in rural Bangladesh, but their paths eventually branched off in different directions. One become a Vaishnava Hindu sannyasi, Saragrahi Swami Maharaja (“Swami”), the other, a Jesuit Christian monk, Father Frances Yona, S.J. (“Frank”). They lost track of each other, but after a chance meeting in Jaipur some years ago, the two began corresponding intermittently. Now, the two have decided to take the time to meet again, to sit down and discuss their respective traditions.

Steven Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa) is no novice to interreligious dialogue. In 1989, he published a small book called Kṛṣṇa Consciousness and Christianity: East-West Dialogues, consisting of discussions between himself and Rev. Alvin Van Pelt Hart, Director of Clinical Pastoral Education, St. Luke’s Hospital. This book was followed in 1990 by similar discussions with the (reputedly fictional) Jewish Rabbi Jacob N. Shimmel (Om Shalom: Judaism and Krishna Consciousness). Rosen has also written on Buddhism from a Vaishnava perspective (From Nothingness to Personhood: a collection of essays on Buddhism from a Vaishnava-Hindu perspective), though dispensing with the dialogic form there.

Even though the cover design of the Christ and Krishna is somewhat trite, the small format and the graphic layout of the work is pleasant and attractive. The chapters are divided by clear subheadings into eminently readable portions. As this is a book for a wide circle of readers, Rosen has wisely chosen to dispense with diacritics (e.g., writing “Krishna” instead of “Kṛṣṇa”). The book has no notes or bibliography, but since the quotations given in the book are usually clearly referenced, the curious reader will have little difficulty in looking them up.

In this book Steven Rosen utilizes a fictional setting for the dialogue. Much as in Srila Bhaktivinoda’s Jaiva Dharma, the plot and the characters can be said to be rather rudimentary. Readers expecting to see character development or a distinct literary prose are apt to be disappointed: the framework of the dialogue is just that, a framework. In fact, the characters are not very believable. Rather than sounding like two Bengalis, they come across as Steven Rosen and Alvin Van Pelt Hart. Frank refers to European Christian theologians such as Geddes MacGregor and Hans Küng rather than to Indian Christians such as Sunder Singh or Raymond Panikkar. Steven Rosen can be said to follow the approach of Yogi Ramacharaka (William Walker Atkinson) and other early Western writers on Hinduism, whose Indian spiritual teachers rather ludicrously quote their Latin and Greek classics with ease ‒ but whom Western readers also could identify with, and therefore learn essential aspects of Indian thinking from. It is precisely in this bridging of East and West that Rosen has always been at his very best. If I had Christian friends or relatives that were opposed to my Vaishnava Hindu religion, this is just the book I would give them.

Interreligious dialogue is often held to have begun with the famous Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and is generally supposed to lead to mutual understanding rather than religious conversion. Reasons for engaging in such dialogue may nevertheless vary. Sometimes “dialogue” is a mere front for proselytizing. Scholars of interreligious dialogue call this “discursive dialogue”; Martin Buber may be less polite but more to the point when he calls it “monologue disguised as dialogue.” Engaging in interreligious dialogue is also a way for small, little-understood religious movements to get to play with the big boys, as it were, and gain both credibility as “real religions” and important social connections. Especially when faced with external threats (e.g., from the anti-cult movement), such movements often evince a new-found enthusiasm for dialogue.

In his introduction, Steven Rosen argues for a kind of philosophia perennis or essential spirituality found in all the major religions behind external appearances such as dogma and rituals. This essence, or soul of religion, to use Rosen’s term, is found in mysticism. However, in the book itself, it is only the two concluding chapters that deal with mysticism in the two religious traditions. Before that, Rosen sets the stage by having his protagonists discuss potentially divisive issues such as religious conversion, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and the identity of Jesus. The material here is not new. Bhaktipada’s widely distributed Christ and Kṛṣṇa: The Path of Pure Devotion from 1986 deals with many of the same issues. In fact, many of these chapters read as abridgements of Rosen’s earlier work on these topics, and some of Father Frances’ statements are taken over verbatim from Rev. Alvin Van Pelt Hart. But this should not be seen as a blemish: it would be foolish for Rosen not to repeat what his earlier work has taught him. Similar reuse of material can be seen in the works of many of his predecessors, such as Srila Jiva Goswami, who in his Krama-sandarbha simply reshuffles the contents of his Bhagavata-Sandarbha. What is more, as always, Rosen’s text is very enjoyable reading. I cannot think of any other text that would give as useful an overview of all of his work as this one does.

Now, while acknowledging the essential truth of all religions, Rosen maintains that the Vedic (understood in the modern, broad sense) literature, “objectively speaking,” represents the “unabridged dictionary” of the truth. This can be seen throughout the book, where it is generally the Swami who leads the discussion; Frank comes close to accepting even the transmigration of souls (though perhaps in the interest of fairness, Rosen does on the other hand have the Swami subscribe to the “fall from Vaikuntha”-theory—very similar to the Christian idea of falling from grace).

At any rate, this is certainly discursive dialogue—Rosen in no way hides his own Vaishnava affiliation, though compared to Kṛṣṇa Consciousness and Christianity, he is here much more of a listener, and his own tone is quite different—but it also makes sense. In order to point toward the harmony of the mystical aspects of Christianity and Vaishnava Hinduism, Rosen wishes to show how even the most divisive doctrinal differences of these two traditions may be reconciled. Scholars may point out weaknesses in specific arguments or examples (for me personally, particularly the arguments for Jesus’ visit to India seem weak, and the account of the description of Jesus in the Bhavisya Purana is glaringly inaccurate), but even in our present “post-secular” times, it is Christianity, not Vaishnavism, that holds the upper hand in situations of dialogue. There is therefore a clear need for books that reverse this situation, something that this book does already by its setting, locating the dialogue at a Hindu sacred place in India. When this reversal of power is furthermore done in such a respectful and thoughtful way as in this text, one is left with no other option than congratulating the author. Steven Rosen remains one of the most important voices of Western Vaishnavism.

Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India. Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2008.

Reviewed by David Mumford

Did you know that Vedic priests were using the socalled Pythagorean theorem to construct their fire altars in 800 BCE?; that the differential equation for the sine function, in finite difference form, was described by Indian mathematician-astronomers in the fifth century CE?; and that “Gregory’s” series π/4 = 1−1/3 +1/5 −· · · was proven using the power series for arctangent and, with ingenious summation methods, used to accurately compute π in southwest India in the fourteenth century? If any of this surprises you, Plofker’s book is for you.

Her book fills a huge gap: a detailed, eminently readable, scholarly survey of the full scope of Indian¹ mathematics and astronomy (the two were inseparable in India) from their Vedic beginnings to roughly 1800. There is only one other survey, Datta and Singh’s 1938 History of Hindu Mathematics, recently reprinted but very hard to obtain in the West (I found a copy in a small specialized bookstore in Chennai). They describe in some detail the Indian work in arithmetic and algebra and, supplemented by the equally hard to find Geometry in Ancient and Medieval India by Sarasvati Amma (1979), one can get an overview of most topics.² But the drawback for Westerners is that neither gives much historical context or explains the importance of astronomy as a driving force for mathematical research in India. While Western scholars have been studying traditional Indian mathematics since the late eighteenth century and Indian scholars have been working hard to assemble and republish surviving Sanskrit manuscripts, a widespread appreciation of the greatest achievements and the unique characteristics of the Indian approach to mathematics has been lacking in the West. Standard surveys of the history of mathematics hardly scratch the surface in telling this story.³ Today, there is a resurgence of activity in this area both in India and the West. The prosperity and success of India has created support for a new generation of Sanskrit scholars to dig deeper into the huge literature still hidden in Indian libraries. Meanwhile the shift in the West toward a multicultural perspective has allowed us Westerners to shake off old biases and look more clearly at other traditions. This book will go a long way to opening the eyes of all mathematicians and historians of mathematics to the rich legacy of mathematics to which India gave birth.

The first episode in the story of Indian mathematics is that of the Sulba-sutras, “The rules of the cord”, described in section 2.2 of Plofker’s book.⁴ These are part of the “limbs of the Vedas”, secular compositions⁵ that were orally transmitted, like the sacred verses of the Vedas themselves. The earliest, composed by Baudh¯ayana, is thought to date from roughly 800 BCE. On the one hand, this work describes rules for laying out with cords the sacrificial fire altars of the Vedas. On the other hand, it is a primer on plane geometry, with many of the same constructions and assertions as those found in the first two books of Euclid. In particular, as I mentioned above, one finds here the earliest explicit statement of “Pythagorean” theorem (so it might arguably be called Baudh¯ayana’s theorem). It is completely clear that this result was known to the Babylonians circa 1800 BCE, but they did not state it as such—like all theirmathematical results, it is only recorded in examples and in problems using it. And, to be sure, there are no justifications for it in the Sulba-sutras either—these sutras are just lists of rules. But Pythagorean theorem was very important because an altar often had to have a specific area, e.g., two or three times that of another. There is much more in these sutras: for example, Euclidean style “geometric algebra”, very good approximations to p2, and reasonable approximations to π.

Another major root of Indian mathematics is the work of Panini and Pingala (perhaps in the fifth century BCE and the third century BCE respectively), described in section 3.3 of Plofker’s book Though Panini is usually described as the great grammarian of Sanskrit, codifying the rules of the language that was then being written down for the first time, his ideas have a much wider significance than that. Amazingly, he introduced abstract symbols to denote various subsets of letters and words that would be treated in some common way in some rules; and he produced rewrite rules that were to be applied recursively in a precise order.⁶  One could say without exaggeration that he anticipated the basic ideas of modern computer science. One wishes Plofker had described Panini’s ideas at more length. As far as I know, there is no exposition of his grammar that would make it accessible to the non-linguist/Sanskrit scholar. P. P. Divakaran has traced the continuing influence of the idea of recursion on Indian mathematics,⁷ leading to the thesis that this is one of the major distinctive features of Indian mathematics.

Pingala, who came a few centuries later, analyzed the prosody of Sanskrit verses. To do so, he introduced what is essentially binary notation for numbers, along with Pascal’s triangle (the binomial coefficients). His work started a long line of research on counting patterns, including many of the fundamental ideas of combinatorics (e.g., the “Fibonacci” sequence appears sometime in 500-800 CE in the work of Virahanka). There is an interesting treatment of this early period of Indian mathematics in Frits Staal’s excellent recent book Discovering the Vedas,⁸ ch.14. For example, Staal traces recursion back to the elaborate and precise structure of Vedic rituals. After this period, unfortunately, one encounters a gap, and very little survives to show what mathematicianswere thinking about formore than 500 years. This was the period of Alexander’s invasion, the Indo-Greek Empire that existed side by side with the Mauryan dynasty including Asoka’s reign, and the Indo-Scythian and Kushan empires that followed. It was a period of extensive trade between India and the West, India and China. Was there an exchange of mathematical ideas too? No one knows, and this has become a rather political point. Plofker, I believe, does a really good job discussing the contentious issues, stating in section 4.6 the “consensus” view but also the other points of view. She states carefully the arguments on both sides and lets the reader take away what he or she will. She deals similarly with the early influences from the Middle East in section 2.5 and of the exchanges with the Islamic world in Chapter 8. For my part, I follow my late colleague David Pingree,whotrainedawhole generationof scholars in ancient mathematics and astronomy. He argues that the early version of Greek astronomy, due to Hipparchus, reached India along with Greek astrology. The early Indian division of the ecliptic into twenty-eight Naksatras, (the moon slept with a different wife every night in each trip around the ecliptic)was replaced by theGreek zodiac of twelve solar constellations and—more to the point—an analysis of solar, lunar, and planetary motion based on epicycles appears full-blown in the great treatise, the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata, written in 499 CE. But also many things in the Indian treatment are totally different from the Greek version. Their treatment of spherical trigonometry is based on three-dimensional projections, using right triangles inside the sphere,⁹ an approach which I find much simpler and more natural than Ptolemy’s use of Menelaus’s theorem. Above all, as mentioned above, they found the finite difference equation satisfied by samples sin(n..θ) of sine (see Plofker, section 4.3.3). This seems to have set the future development of mathematics and astronomy in India on a path totally distinct from anything in the West (or in China).

Download the entire review in PDF format, here.

1. The word “India” is used in Plofker’s book and in my review to indicate the whole of the Indian subcontinent, including especially Pakistan, where many famous centers of scholarship, e.g., Takshila, were located.
2. For those who might be in India and want to find copies, Datta and Singh’s book is published by Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, Delhi, and Amma’s book by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. An excellent way to trace the literature is through Hayashi’s article “Indian mathematics” in the AMS’s CD History of Mathematics from Antiquity to the Present: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (2000).
3. The only survey that comes close is Victor Katz’s A History of Mathematics.
4. There are multiple ways to transcribe Sanskrit (and Hindi) characters into Roman letters. We follow the precise scholarly system, as does Plofker (cf. her Appendix A) which uses diacritical marks: (i) long vowels have a bar over them; (ii) there are “retroflex” versions of t, d, and n where the tongue curls back, indicated by a dot beneath the letter; (iii) h, as in th, indicates aspiration, a breathy sound, not the English “th”; and (iv) the “sh” sound is written either as ´s or as s. (the two are distinguishable to Indians but not native English speakers).
5. Technically, they are called smrti (“remembered text”) as opposed to sruti (“heard”, i.e., from divine sources).
6. To get a glimpse of this, see Plofker, p. 54; F. Staal, “Artificial languages across sciences and civilization”, J. Indian Philosophy, pp. 89–141 (esp. sections 11–12), 2006; or B. Gillon, “Astadhyayi and linguistic theory”, J. Indian Philosophy, pp. 445–468, 2007.
7. “Notes on Yukti-Bhasa: Recursive methods in Indian mathematics”, forthcoming in a book entitled Studies in the History of Mathematics in India.
8. Penguin Books, 2008.
9. A basic formula in the Gola section of the Aryabhatiyais that if P is a point on the ecliptic with longitude λ, then the declination δ of P is given by sin(δ) = sin(λ). sin(i), i the inclination of the ecliptic. If I understand it right, later writings suggest this was proven by considering the planar right triangle given by P, P1, P2, where P1 is the orthogonal projection of P onto the plane of the equator (inside the sphere!) and P2 is its projection onto the line through Υ, the intersection of the equator and the ecliptic. It is immediate to derive the formula using this triangle.

Food for the Soul: Vegetarianism and Yoga Traditions

Reviewed by Charles S. J. White, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion, American University, Washington, D.C.

This is a book that needed to be written. Period. Today, yoga is often thought of as a catch-phrase for exercises of a particular kind, and few know—or care—about its hoary roots in Hindu tradition. Those who do know are divided about whether or not one needs to be a vegetarian. But as Rosen and other well-chosen contributors prove in this edited volume—there really should be no question about a yogi’s diet. Yoga means higher consciousness, and higher consciousness means love and compassion. Indeed, Patanjali and other early authorities on the yoga tradition assert that ahimsa, nonaggression, is as integral to yoga as meditation is, and Rosen’s contributors cite all the right sources, making this clear and obvious—and also that this nonaggression extends to the point of vegetarianism.

And speaking of the contributors, Rosen, for this book, brilliantly gathered together representatives of all the modern yoga schools, from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to Swami Satchidananda, from Jivamukti to Jain yoga traditions. The net result is that the reader becomes privy to all the voices necessary to understand yoga and its authentic connection to a harmless diet. Each major yoga school is represented, both by practitioners and by scholars, so that readers become aware of all the arguments involved, and, in the end, see the reality of the subject at hand: that one needs to adhere to a non-meat diet if one hopes to practice yoga in the proper way.

Rosen’s introductory article particularly intrigued me. He shows that, though there are clearly exceptions, most yoga lineages today can be traced to two accomplished yogis in the tradition: Sri Krishnamacharya and Swami Sivananda. Krishnamacharya is the fount of teachers such as K. Pattabhi Jois, T. K. V. Desikachar, and B. K. S. Iyengar, whose techniques consist of Ashtanga-Vinyasa, Viniyoga, and the Iyengar Method, respectively. Sivananda’s tradition, on the other hand, gave rise to the Integral Yoga Institute, Swami Satchidananda, Swami Chinmayananda, and others. Rosen’s point is as follows: most yoga practitioners today use the methods formulated by these two men, either as they were originally espoused or in conjunction with other methods. And both these men promoted vegetarianism! Clearly, then, all groups and lineages that sprouted from these sources should promote the same teachings they did, including vegetarianism.

Then after making his point, Rosen engages many voices of authorities on yoga to speak for themselves, as already stated, so that by the end of the book, there is no question of an alternative point of view, at least not if one is practicing authentic yoga.

As an addendum, albeit an important one, Rosen offers two final essays, one by Joshua Greene and another authored by Rosen himself, on the subject of bhakti-yoga, which, according to the Bhagavad-gita (6.47), is the culminating yoga system in the practice of yoga. Here, again, we see that vegetarianism is unequivocally mandated. In this way, it becomes clear that there is simply no arguing the point—from the most basic forms of yoga to the most advanced, vegetarianism is unavoidable if one wants to reach perfection in practice.

For those who are meat-eating yogis, wanting an easy way out, this book is to be avoided at all costs. If, however, you are either a vegetarian or someone who is sitting on the fence—a sincere meat eater who is ready to give up eating meat for his or her practice of yoga—this book will offer much direction, knowledge, and food for thought.

(Ordering info: http://www.abc-clio.com/product.aspx?id=2147508103)

Reviewed by Bhrigupada dasa

Steven J. Rosen (Satyaraja Dasa) is one of the most prolific of our modern Gaudiya Vaishnava authors, with innumerable books and articles to his credit. Not only is his production large, it is also extremely variegated: he has authored everything from Vaishnava hagiography (Black Lotus: The Spiritual Journey of an Urban Mystic) to interfaith dialogues (Krishna Consciousness and Christianity: East-West Dialogues), popular presentations on vegetarianism and spirituality (Diet for Transcendence: Vegetarianism and the World Religions), and scholarly presentations on Vaishnava Hinduism (Essential Hinduism). Additionally, in several books he has engaged in a fruitful dialogue with popular culture (e.g. In Defense of Reality, Jedi in the Lotus: a Hindu Perspective on Star Wars). Many are the young Krishna devotees that have been inspired by his way of showing that one can walk the bhakti path without turning into an automaton or losing one’s sense of what’s happening. On top of this, Steven Rosen is also founding editor of Journal of Vaishnava Studies, an important academic journal that will soon celebrate its twentieth year of continuous publication.

In Krishna’s Other Song, Steven Rosen attempts something new: scriptural commentary. As the title indicates, he has done so with Krishna’s better-known Gita before (Krishna’s Song: a new look at the Bhagavad Gita, 2007), but while Krishna’s Song was a collection of essays on the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna’s Other Song is a translation of and commentary on the original verses of a related text, the Uddhava-gita. The reason for this difference is not difficult to understand: while there are many different Vaishnava Bhagavad-gitas readily available, there is a clear need for a readable Uddhava-gita from Vaishnava perspective. By leaving out the Sanskrit and keeping the commentary short and to the point, Rosen manages to present the whole Uddhava-gita in less than 300 pages. Hardbound and with an attractive cover, this makes for very appealing packaging.

What about the contents, then? First of all, it is no mean feat that Rosen has managed to engage noted Hinduism scholar Charles S.J. White to write a brief but very informative and positive Foreword. This is followed by a brief Introduction, in which Rosen locates the Uddhava-gita within its larger context, the Bhagavata Purana, but also offers the reader some hints into the uniquely Gaudiya Vaishnava insights on Uddhava, as detailed in works such as Rupa Goswami’s Uddhava Sandesha. Rosen then gives a very useful summary of the Uddhava-gita as a whole, ending with a few lines about his translation and commentary.

As Rosen himself writes, his edition is not meant to be a literal translation. Since Rosen is not a Sanskritist, that would probably not have been possible, but most of all, such a translation would not have accomplished his purpose: to bring out the essential devotional meaning of the Uddhava-gita by paraphrasing the text according to the understanding of the Gaudiya Vaishnava teachers. In practical terms, this means that the verses of the original text have been rendered into separate pieces of easy English prose in the style of Srila Prabhupada. In terms of layout, the translations are indented and printed in bold. This is graphically not a very attractive solution, especially in the cases where there is little commentary.

I should have wished for a little more stringency in the translations. Sometimes for example the term bhakti is left untranslated, sometimes it is translated as “spiritual devotion” and at other times as “devotional service”.  Phrases such as “make no mistake” and “this is the point” or terms such as “spiritual seekers” may make for easy reading, but at least to my ears, they sound rather too modern in an ancient text. But in general, the translation is very clear and readable, and since that is Rosen’s explicit goal, he must be said to have succeeded well.

However, I do have one other gripe with the language: while the book downplays or even hides the connection between the author and Iskcon—Srila Prabhupada and even some present Iskcon gurus are mentioned several times but never the movement itself—the language is to a large extent the same old Iskcon lingo. Since Steven Rosen in no way is an insulated temple devotee, it is both surprising and disappointing to see him use words such as sun planet, pastimes, or deity worship when trying to reach a general, spiritually interested audience.

While much of the commentary simply elucidates difficult concepts in the text itself (such as some of the details of Varnashram society), one consistent thrust is aimed at refuting a non-dualist understanding of the Uddhava-gita. Considering that the best-known translation available of this text (by Swami Ambikananda Saraswati) is heavily slanted in this “mayavadi” direction, this decision is both understandable and corrective, but I think a more nuanced understanding could have been possible. Rosen himself hints at this when he speaks of the “advaitic theism” of the Bhagavata Purana (p. 7), borrowing Daniel Sheridan’s apposite phrase. Another general theme is comparisons with the Bhagavad-gita and, to a smaller extent, Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra, which is often quite useful. From time to time, Rosen also engages in interreligious comparisons (e.g., 7, 28, 268), but the limited amount of space at his disposal perhaps restrained him here.

This limitation of space also limits the usefulness of the commentary. I would especially have liked to see more of what I feel Rosen does best: presenting ancient teachings in a way relevant for people of today. There are attempts at this here and there, particularly in the last chapter (on bhakti-yoga), but Rosen must have felt restrained by the format of the book. It seems to me that he would have come into his own if another devotee (e.g. Graham Schweig) had done a straight translation and he could have written a separate book on the Uddhava-gita instead.

In closing, it should be noted that whatever negative critique I have offered above has been stated with much reluctance. It is doubtful whether any other living Gaudiya Vaishnava has done more to bring Srila Prabhupada’s teachings into new circles: popular, spiritual and academic. In doing this, Rosen has several times had to take stern criticism from more fundamentalist quarters of Iskcon, but he has not let it change his agenda.  I have personally benefitted greatly from both his books and his journal, in the latter case both as a reader and contributor. If Steven Rosen would permit it, though I doubt he would, I would hold his feet on my head. This book is an important addition to the library of any spiritual seeker. The Uddhava-gita deserves many more readers, and will surely find many of them through Rosen’s new edition.

The following first appeared on Religion Dispatches. Read more and sign up for their free daily newsletter here.

Philip Goldberg, American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West. Harmony Books, 2010.

Reviewed by Michael J. Altman:

A Methodist church near my house advertises for “Gentle Yoga Classes” on one of those church signs usually reserved for witty and redemptive one-liners like “Jesus: Your Get Out of Hell Free Card.” Meanwhile, a local pizza place lists a “Kosmic Karma” pie on its menu. Indian spiritual language has crept into American vernacular culture. But where did it come from? Is there some connection between karmic pizza and yoga in church?

In American Veda, Philip Goldberg tells the story of a new American tradition, derived from both the practices of yoga, and the philosophy of Vedanta. He names this “Vedanta-Yoga,” as distinguished from other aspects of Hindu religious culture (such as the worship of multi-limbed deities) that might be less meaningful for Americans.

For Goldberg, it all adds up to the slow “Vedicization” of American spirituality. By this he means that Americans have become more comfortable with a view of the world ultimately found in the ancient literature of India—the Vedas, the Upanisads, and the Bhagavad-gita. First, there is the idea that the self and the ground of Being (or the Divine, God, Brahman, Consciousness, etc.) are one. The full realization of this truth leads to liberation and the cessation of suffering. Second, there are a number of paths toward this realization and no single path works for everyone. Third, it follows then that, at bottom, all religious and spiritual traditions, while looking different, share the same goal of divine realization. Vedanta-Yoga is thus a monist, pluralist, and perennialist tradition of American spirituality built from Indian religious sources.

Two Hundred Years of American Vedanta

In the nineteenth century the first wave of Vedic thought broke on American shores. Transcendentalists, including Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read the Bhagavad Gita and found in it a spiritual solution to the materialism of early American industrialism. Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott turned to Vedic sources and combined them with Western esoteric and occult traditions to produce Theosophy. Goldberg also finds Vedic influences in the 19th-century births of Christian Science and New Thought movements.

The nineteenth century was capped off with the 1893 arrival of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk and disciple of the Bengali guru Ramakrishna, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago where he spoke to a crowd of liberal Protestants about the basics of Vedanta philosophy. Vivekananda stuck around and established the Vedanta Societies that are still with us today. Vivekananda offered a flesh and blood example of the Vedic philosophy Americans had found in ancient Indian texts throughout the century.

The second wave of Vedic influence reached its apex in the counterculture of the 1960s but has its roots in much earlier in the twentieth century. Decades before the Beatles met the Maharishi, a set of public intellectuals that included the likes of Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley propagated Vedic ideas they learned from Vivekananda’s Vedanta Society. The popularity of Swami Yogananda and his Autobiography of a Yogi gave Vedanta-Yoga further steam in the middle of the century. In the 1950s, the writings of Indian gurus like Sri Aurobindo found their way into America and the American Academy of Asian Studies was founded in 1951. Then came the Maharishi. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi founded Transcendental Meditation and taught the Beatles to meditate. The Hare Krishnas came too. By the 1970s, following changes in American immigration laws, a whole generation of Indian gurus and yogis brought Vedanta-Yoga to America. Goldberg calls these the “Baby Boomer’s Babas.” This was the period of building institutions for Americans to practice yoga, meditate, pursue the study of Vedanta, and gather around a guru.

In the wake of institution-building the final wave pushed Vedanta-Yoga out into the broader cultural streams. Homegrown American advocates such as Ram Dass and Deepak Chopra emerged. Academic “pandit practitioners” taught in religion and theology departments, deepening Americans’ understanding of Vedic thought. Artists like John Coltrane were drawn to Vedic philosophy and Indian music. In the field of science, physicists saw a parallel to their discoveries in quantum physics in Vedanta philosophy.

Vedanta-Yoga became such a part of of American culture that other religions could apparently not resist it—thus came Christian yoga, Jewish yoga, and the sign at my local Methodist church. The Vedicization of America continues, argues Goldberg, as the millennial generation absorbs Vedic ideas and yogic practices. For Goldberg, the “spiritual but not religious crowd” is just the latest version of American Vedanta-Yoga.

A Nation of Pragmatic Mystics

Goldberg’s narrative is expansive. He constructs a broad history for Vedanta-Yoga in America that ranges from Madonna to religion scholar Huston Smith. But more than just expansive, Goldberg’s narrative is itself ever-expanding. It is a story of cultural development that mirrors the personal development of the yogi or vedantan. As Goldberg tells it, from its earliest nineteenth century encounter forward, American culture has been on a path of enlightenment and liberation that continues toward more and more spiritual freedom. Built into this narrative of national and cultural development enlightenment are tropes of the free market. Gurus and yogis succeeded in the religious marketplace, Goldberg argues, because they provided Americans spiritual commodities that worked. Furthermore, those yogis and gurus that were best able to adapt themselves to the American market were most successful. Yoga, stripped down to poses, whipped people into shape. Transcendental Meditation (which Maharishi stressed was a practice and not religious) lowered stress. Vedanta-Yoga offered a spiritual wholeness to practitioners but also adapted to the market. But Vedic teaching and practice worked, so Americans bought it. As Goldberg puts it, we are a nation of “pragmatic mystics.”

If there is one problem at the heart of Goldberg’s analysis, though, it is his reliance on a reductive vision of the difference between East and West. As Goldberg tells it, in the past two centuries the spiritual East (read India) has brought spirituality to the materialist West. In this view, the West is materialist, outward, scientific, and ego-building while the East is spiritual, inward, mystical, and ego-transcending. Vedicization, then, is the synthesis of these two poles into a new American spirituality of practical mysticism.

Such a narrative ignores both material realities in India and spiritual realities in America. To pick just one example, Swami Vivekananda was the product of a Bengali society greatly affected by British imperialism. He was part of a nouveau riche class in and around Calcutta. He got a Western education from a Protestant missionary college and he was the product of the Bengali Renaissance triggered by the economic, colonial, and cultural encounter between Indians and Britons. Meanwhile, American culture has its own history of mystical, esoteric, and spiritual resources. While Theosophists, Christian Scientists, Transcendentalists, and New Thoughters were influenced by Vedic texts, they were also part of a long Western tradition of esotericism and metaphysics. Emmanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer had has much if not more influence on these groups as Vedic texts. The “spiritual East comes to the material West” narrative is powerful but it is over-simple.

This is not just Goldberg’s narrative. It was also Emerson’s, Vivekananda’s, and the Maharishi’s. In this way, Goldberg is writing from within the Vedanta-Yoga tradition he describes. I doubt he would dispute this. This position within the tradition has given him a passion and a vision for all the ways it has influenced America, and Goldberg’s book offers a wonderfully comprehensive account of the many places Vedanta-Yoga has filtered into our culture.

While his advocacy for the cause may oversimplify things at times, the accessibility of his writing and the broad scope of his material make up for it. For “the spiritual but not religious” wondering how they got there, for those wondering who those Indian dudes are on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, and for Methodists doing yoga, Goldberg offers an important story of America’s practical mysticism.

Reviewed by Ned Denny

Reviewed by Sarah Blakewell

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the answer was obvious: to test a philosophy, find out if you can live by it. This is “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something,” he wrote in 1874. It’s also the form of critique that is generally overlooked in the philosophy faculties of universities. Nietzsche therefore dismissed the professional discipline as irrelevant, a “critique of words by means of other words,” and devoted himself to pursuing an idiosyncratic philosophical quest outside the academy. As for texts, he wrote, “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius” — the popular third-century Epicurean author of a biographical compilation called “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.” If the proof of philosophy lies in life, then what could be more useful than reading about how the great philosophers have lived?

As James Miller shows in his fascinating “Examined Lives,” choosing Diogenes Laertius over more rigorous treatises was provocative because it challenged an idea already predominant in Nie­tzsche’s time: that a philosophy should be objectively valid, without the need to refer to particular quirks or life experiences on the part of its originator. Diogenes Laertius represents an older tradition, which sees philosophy not as a set of precepts but as something one learns by following a wise man — sometimes literally following him wherever he goes, listening, and observing how he handles situations. The “Lives” offers its readers a vicarious opportunity to try this with a number of philosophers, and see whose way works best.

Miller has now had the superb idea of taking Diogenes Laertius as a model, while simultaneously using this model to test whether such an approach can still offer us anything of value. He covers 12 philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with Laertius), Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson and Nietzsche. In each case, he explores the life selectively, looking for “crux” points and investigating how ideas of the philosophical life have changed. Few readers will be astounded to learn that philosophers make as much of a mess of their lives as anyone else. But Miller, a professor of politics at the New School and author of a biography of Michel Foucault, among other books, does not rest with digging out petty failings or moments of hypocrisy. He shows us philosophers becoming ever more inclined to reflect on these failings, and suggests that this makes their lives more rather than less worth studying.

His starting point is Socrates, the most mythologized of all thinkers, the original source of the statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and the philosopher whose life became the measure for all others. Early biographers wrote with awe of Socrates’ strange, itinerant approach to wisdom; of his habit of hanging around the marketplace striking up conversations with any passer-by willing to talk or of standing motionless in the street all night while he thought a problem through. But what really set him apart was his death, which redefined his whole life. Condemned by a panel of 501 Athenian citizens to kill himself with hemlock, Socrates carried out the sentence with perfect composure and in full rational awareness — or so the myth has it. No greater confirmation of the value of a philosopher’s existence could be imagined. As Socrates himself said, “Don’t you think that actions are more reliable evidence than words?”

The rest of “Examined Lives”can be read as a history of other philosophers’ failures to measure up to this ideal, either in their deaths or their lives. One of Miller’s great transitional figures is the Roman court-philosopher Seneca. Living half a millennium after Socrates, he too was condemned to death by suicide. He accepted his fate with Socratic courage, but his death itself was difficult. He slit his wrists before begging for a cup of hemlock and retiring to a hot bath to expire. The messiness of his death reflected a morally messy life. For, while his writings promoted wisdom, balance, restraint and detachment, Seneca himself was forced into numerous compromises in the service of his protégé and employer, the murderous emperor Nero. He even helped Nero plot the murder of Agrippina, the emperor’s own mother. The strain was evident. “I am not wise,” Seneca wrote; “nor . . . shall I ever be.” Yet he also advised his favorite correspondent, Lucilius, to “harmonize talk with life.” As Miller remarks, Seneca was “in conflict” with himself.

Read the entire New York Times article, here.

Actually, as the brilliant French social scientist Olivier Roy points out in “Holy Ignorance,” it is those defending Christmas who are not being true to their traditions and teachings. There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts.

Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.

Over the past few years, a number of theories have been offered about the rise of fundamentalism. Roy proposes the most original — and the most persuasive. Fundamentalism, in his view, is a symptom of, rather than a reaction against, the increasing secularization of society. Whether it takes the form of the Christian right in the United States or Salafist purity in the Muslim world, fundamentalism is not about restoring a more authentic and deeply spiritual religious experience. It is instead a manifestation of holy ignorance, Roy’s biting term meant to characterize the worldview of those who, having lost both their theology and their roots, subscribe to ideas as incoherent as they are ultimately futile. The most important thing to know about those urging the restoration of a lost religious authenticity is that they are sustained by the very forces they denounce.

Two tectonic shifts have produced the gap that fundamentalism fills. One concerns the question that has dominated the sociology of religion for more than a century: Will faith decline as modernity advances? The great thinkers of another era — Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber — believed that in one way or another it would. Today’s leading sociologists point to Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden to claim that it will not. Roy stands with yesterday’s giants. It is true, he concedes, that conservative religion is growing. But any talk of a religious revival is “an optical illusion.” Religion, he writes, “is both more visible and at the same time frequently in decline.” It cedes so much to the secular world that it can no longer offer a transcendental alternative to it.

We are, in addition, witnessing the severing of religion from the cultures within which it was once embedded. Religion and culture have long existed in an uneasy embrace. Catholicism is presumably a universal faith, yet long before the reforms of Vatican II allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular, Brazilian Catholicism owed as much to its South American roots as Polish Catholicism did to its Eastern European ones. Islam sought to conquer the world, or as much of it as it could, yet it was intimately connected to the Arab culture in which it was born. The only reason we do not find the term “secular Jew” puzzling is because we appreciate that Judaism is both an ethnic and a religious category. Much the same can be said for many of the other world religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism.

If religion is in decline in the modern world, Roy argues, so is culture. On the one hand, we have multiculturalism, celebrations of diversity that somehow wind up making all cultures look and feel alike. More important, we face globalization, today’s true universal faith, which subjects all local customs to the laws of the market. Under the influence of both, religion loses whatever affinities it may once have had with the cultures that sustained it. Jakarta, the capital of the world’s largest Muslim country, lies some 5,000 miles from the holy city of Mecca, and even Mecca, Roy argues, has lost much of its specifically Arab character.

Japanese pilgrims travel to San Francisco to find a more vibrant Buddhist culture than Tokyo can offer. Mormons, no longer confined to Utah, find adherents in Manila. Even the Christian Orthodox churches that are defined by their countries of origin lose their ethnic character; significant numbers of adherents to Orthodoxy in France have refused to come under the authority of the Russian patriarch.

Culture’s stickiest component is language. When the word of God was literally expressed in words, language inhibited religious expansion; preachers could speak only to those who understood what they were saying. With the rise of Pentecostalism, one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, followers are encouraged to speak in tongues, which requires no language at all. Meanwhile television and the Internet contribute to fundamentalism’s appeal; both make it possible for Egyptian imams (preaching no doubt in “globish,” the pidgin form of English that emerges wherever globalization takes root) to reach their followers in Europe. One does not know whether to be in awe of faith’s capacity to adapt or distraught by the hodgepodge that enables it to do so. “The Holy Spirit,” Roy writes, “is anywhere and everywhere. There is no need to have a real rock on which to build the Church.” God only knows what St. Peter would make of that.

Roy’s “Failure of Political Islam,” published in French in 1992 and English in 1994, infuriated those who viewed radical Islam as the major enemy of the West. Roy maintained in that book that Islamism, the perversion of Muslim faith into a utopian political movement, had little to offer ordinary Muslims and would therefore be unable to remain in power very long. (In subsequent work, Roy argues, I believe convincingly, that the ideology currently governing Iran or motivating Hamas has more to do with nationalism than with religion.) This is not a point of view that sits well with those who consider something they call Islamofascism the greatest threat to the West since Hitler. But Roy knows Islam (and Islamism) inside out. It is a shame that his views did not receive the attention in the United States given to those of Bernard Lewis, whose more belligerent take on Islam helped persuade the Bush administration to invade Iraq.

“Holy Ignorance” extends Roy’s thesis to all forms of fundamentalism, not just those associated with the Muslim world. Consider the Tea Party movement, whose views on both the Constitution and the Bible insist on the wisdom contained in sacred texts. Tea Partiers, while fearful of liberal and secular elites, prefer to concentrate on President Obama’s alleged socialism. That too amounts to ignorance, but it is no longer very holy.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.