Idolatry: A User’s Guide

It all started when that guy on Facebook linked an academic essay upbraiding Jacques Derrida’s failure to live up to the Christian ideal in his book The Gift of Death. I have a lot of respect for Derrida, whom I think of as probably the most important negative theologian of recent memory; this despite the fact that he was born a Jew in Algeria, experienced anti-Semitism as a youth, and later confessed to being content to “pass for an atheist.”1 That he should be measured with a Christian yard...