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Modern and postmodern forms of unbelief

God’s Funeral, by A. N. Wilson

From the vantage point of this postmodern time, A. N. Wilson surveys the modern, or Enlightenment, era. In a long series of captivating thumbnail biographical sketches, he documents both the force of the modern mind’s attack on religion and the grief that accompanied it as people lamented losing the aesthetic and moral dimensions of faith. Wilson provides vignettes of almost 40 skeptics or atheists, most of whom were unable to exorcise religion completely from their minds and psyches.

Rethinking Modern Judaism, by Arnold M. Eisen

What came first, the chicken of belief or the egg of ritual? And how do they relate to each other? This is a central question posed by Arnold Eisen in his absorbing and wide-ranging account of contemporary Jewish practice. The transformation of that practice resulted from two events sparked by the French Revolution: the Enlightenment and the emancipation of the Jews. It is the ongoing concern of the brightest and the best in emerging Jewish scholarship, of which Eisen is a rising star.