I' faith, you have drunk too much

From Sergey Eyzenshteyn, The Battleship Potemkin, via.

David Brooks has read every single modern book on religious faith, enabling him to say with perfect confidence:

The best modern book on belief is “My Bright Abyss” by my Yale colleague, Christian Wiman. (paragraph 2)

Also he's so in at Yale, as Brady-Johnson Distinguished Practitioner of Grand Strategy at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (course load of one class per year and a little team teaching), that he has colleagues in the Divinity School now.

But I'm not so sure he's really read all that much, because he sounds surprised at having heard quite recently how much reading is involved:

The process of faith, of bringing moments of intense inward understanding into the ballyhoo of life, seems to involve a lot of reading and talking — as people try to make sense of who God is and how holiness should be lived out. Even if you tell people you are merely writing a column on faith, they begin recommending books to you by the dozen. (paragraph 7)

So it's really more likely that somebody sent him a paragraph from p. 70 of Wiman's 2013 book (used for paragraphs 2 and 4), and somebody else sent him a complete text of the "famous fourth footnote" of Joseph Soloveitchik's Halachic Man (1983, pp. 140ff., used in paragraphs 8 and 11), and with a vague memory of a quote from Rabbi Heschel he was home free.

In his famous fourth footnote in “Halakhic Man,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes, “The individual who frees himself from the rational principle and who casts off the yoke of objective thought will in the end turn destructive and lay waste the entire created order. Therefore, it is preferable that religion should ally itself with the forces of clear, logical cognition, as uniquely exemplified in the scientific method, even though at times the two might clash with one another.”

Or as Wiman puts it more elegantly: “Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.” (paragraphs 8-9)

That's how Brooks knows Wiman's book is the best modern book on belief, because it's more elegant than the Rav.

That Wiman quote is from p. 5 of the book, suggesting that Brooks has acquired a copy (he also cites p. 92 at the end of the column). The two quotes are not saying the same thing at all, incidentally, since the Rav treats reason as something to commit to, an ethical obligation, to be allied with religion, and Wiman thinks of it as oppression, at odds with faith, something you'd wish you could overcome.

You won't mind if I just tiptoe away from here, will you? I have a bunch of shopping to do and I expect the Distinguished Practitioner needs to get back to his practitioning. (He's a kind of global chiropractor?)