Favorite Polemics

I’ve loved reading Terry Eagleton since I first encountered his book on Literary Theory; I don’t agree with him all the time, but he writes brilliantly, and even when I’m dissenting from his arguments I relish his prose.

So I wish I’d had a squint at his response to Richard Dawkins before I went on Open Source Radio to talk about Christopher Hitchens (and I wish I had a link to an Eagletonian response to Hitchens). Eagleton’s characterizations of Judaism show him to have blind spots almost as great as those he attributes to Dawkins, but in the cage match between the two, it looks to me as though Eagleton scores a solid take-down.


Debra noted:

Eugene McCarraher’s piece on Hitchens in Commonweal is also worth a squint.

[Thanks, Debra; that was satisfying. But now I have a dilemma, because up to today I had never envisioned Debra among my readers; for some reason, I have the feeling that I ought to write more serious, profound things if she is going to take time to read my blog. Not that I don’t think that the readers of whom I’m already aware are serious and profound. Oh dear, it’s only getting worse.

I’ll stick with “Thanks for the link, Debra!”]

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