About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture

by Mark C. Taylor

"Religion," Mark C. Taylor maintains, "is most interesting where it is least obvious." From global financial networks to the casinos of Las Vegas, from images flickering on computer terminals to steel sculpture, material culture bears unexpected traces of the divine. In a world where the economies of faith are obscure, yet pervasive, Taylor shows that approaching religion directly is less instructive than thinking about it.

Traveling from high culture to pop culture and back again, About Religion approaches cyberspace and Las Vegas through Hegel and Kant and reads Melville's The Confidence-Man through the film Wall Street. As astonishing juxtapositions and associations proliferate, formerly uncharted territories of virtual culture disclose theological vestiges, showing that faith in contemporary culture is as unavoidable as it is elusive.

The most accessible presentation of Taylor's revolutionary ideas to date, About Religion gives us a dazzling and disturbing vision of life at the end of the old and beginning of the new millennium.

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, Theology

304 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Mark C. Taylor, Ph.D. (Religious Studies, Harvard University, 1973; B.A., Wesleyan University, 1968), is a philosopher of religion who chaired the Department of Religion at Columbia University 2007–2015. Previously, he was Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts), where he began his teaching career in 1973.

Reviews

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my Mythology & Philosophy course, we read chapter 7 ("The Virtual Kingdom.") To be honest, what really struck me about this reading is how unfamiliar I am with history. Not that this is a surprise, but I really wish I had a better understanding of place and time. This chapter examines how we got to the 1990's by way of where we were 200 years prior. As Taylor argues, "It is virtually impossible to understand adequately the significance of cultural developments in the twentieth century without an appreciation for the ways in which philosophers and poets appropriated and elaborated Kant's insights." This also served as my first introduction to Kant. The discussion turns to look at what is art and what is not art, and also discusses ideas of purposiveness, cleverly pointing out that even "uselessness has its uses." The chapter also includes references to Hegel and Warhol as it pulls together the transformations seen through the last 200 years. To conclude, "As image is embodied in reality and reality becomes a 'matter' of image, art is realized in a wold that is effectively transformed into a work of art."

[Terese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fortune favors the brave, brave as in "someone who doesn't give up on this book"...
There's a lot of good stuff in here, interesting stuff. Personally I prefer "Confidence Games" though because there's less of this to get through:

”Denegation, by contrast, is a negation that denies itself and, by so doing, repeats the negation it apparently negates. To de-negate is to un-negate; but this un-negation remains a form of negation. More precisely, denegation is an un-negation that affirms rather than negates negation. The affirmation of negation by way of denegation subverts the negation of negation effect by way of dialectical negativity. Denegation, therefore, entails negation without negation.” (32)

Honestly if it hadn't been for school I probably wouldn't have bothered to finish this. Glad I did, but on some level I can't shake the feeling that this book is like art... “useful only if it’s useless, and thus, when it becomes useful it’s useless.” (174)