If We Were Not Called Upon To

Theology, However Implausible Many Of Its Truth Claims, Is One Of The Most Ambitious Theoretical Arenas Left In An Increasingly Specialized World

Poetry Is The Most Subtle Of The Literary Arts, And Students Grow More Ingenious By The Year At Avoiding It. If They Can Nip Around Milton, Duck Under Blake And Collapse Gratefully Into The Arms Of Jane Austen, A Lot Of Them Will.

Dawkins Considers That All Faith Is Blind Faith, And That Christian And Muslim Children Are Brought Up To Believe Unquestioningly. Not Even The Dim-witted Clerics Who Knocked Me About At Grammar School Thought That.

Readers Are Less And Less Seen As Mere Non-writers, The Subhuman "other" Or Flawed Derivative Of The Author; The Lack Of A Pen Is No Longer A Shameful Mark Of Secondary Status But A Positively Enabling Space, Just As Within Every Writer Can Be Seen To Lurk, As A Repressed But Contaminating Antithesis, A Reader.

The Liberal State Is Neutral Between Capitalism And Its Critics Until The Critics Look Like They Are Winning.