All Things Shining: Reading The Western Classics To Find Meaning In A Secular Age (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
The strength of this book lies solely in several segments of literature review such as Homer to Melville. Yet, by linking polytheistic ideas in classic cannons, comparing and contrasting with the secular age of modernity, this book has not done a convincing job to address its central theme: how to bring meaning into secular life. On one hand, the authors highlights various malaise and discomfiture in modernity, yet their proposal of living a new Polytheistic life by attuning one's calling to the "sacred" is an overly general and vague idea. The applying one's meaning without a morally grounded direction is an implausibility, secular or religious. Using David Forest Wallace as the spokesman for this generation's existential malaise is an over simplification, while using Elizabeth Gilbert, a journalistic popular writer, as the modern female writer exemplar is intellectually lazy as well as audience pandering. This is a disappointing book with several brilliant analytic segments on classics. This book sounded so interesting I talked my Sunday Philosophers group into choosing it for our discussion this month. Bad idea; now they'll blame me.I found myself disagreeing with the authors on page 3. I should have realized when they described David Foster Wallace as "the greatest writer of his generation; perhaps the greatest mind altogether" that the authors and I were not sympatico ( for more reasons than that they apparently do not know how to use a semi-colon properly). Then things got even worse as the book proceeded, because most of it was downright boring, which is even worse. The examination of the classics was too drawn out and the discussion of the lessons for today was too sketchy. I also did not like the oblique way he defined his terms.
What do You think about All Things Shining: Reading The Western Classics To Find Meaning In A Secular Age (2011)?
Not bad, not great. Some interesting comparisons of David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert.
—LexTalionis
Interesting conclusions; somewhat long winded chapters, but an intriguing read overall.
—MOO3001
The danger and salvation of nihilism in a nutshell.
—BlackSheep8099
Forget the New Atheism; embrace the New Polytheism
—liuchen
