The Secular Mind

Rating:
Summary: quirky insight into fundamental questions
Review: I am a Robert Coles fan. I remember him as the most inspiring lecturer at Harvard with his quiet and sincere voice. That said I have found most of his writing a disappointment. Finally, with "The Secular Mind" Coles has written a book that is accessible; it may not be as stirring as his lectures (which might show just how important his actual voice is), but at least with this book the reader can get a sense of the quirky and exciting way Coles strives to address the most basic human questions.

The reason this book succeeds more than his others is, I think, because it retains much of the spirit of his lectures. Coles takes a few simple questions: what is the difference between the religious life and the secular life? When, how and why has the secular way of thinking become more dominant in the last two hundred years? How do we deal with these changes given our shared desire for faith and purpose? Coles then consider how many thinkers he respects, including William Carlos Williams, Anna Freud, Dorthy Day, and Walker Percy, have responded to these questions. Part of what is unique about Coles is that he had the chutzpah to seek out and spend plenty of time with these thinkers. The result is a book that is intimate as well as profound.

But this book is not without its faults. I don't understand why Coles insists on making his books so inaccessible. For one thing, this book lacks any kind of index. And then there are his sentences. He can't resist the parenthetical. At every turn there is a clause within a clause. This sentence about George Elliot is typical: "She was, of course, decades ahead of Freud, in her acknowledgement, that way, of the unconscious, its raw power constantly assertive, no matter our notion of ourselves as in (conscious) control of what we say or do." (p. 65)

On balance, Coles is an interesting thinker, willing to raise the most profound personal questions about faith and purpose, and this book is a nice taste of his way of talking and thinking.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing esp. at end
Review: I like Robert Coles' work - he's been an important influence on decades of Harvard undergraduates, of which I was one. This book was useful in some of his reflections - esp. of Walker Percy & Flannery O'Connor and their strategies for exposing the grande folie of the secular mind in an age when the sacred is often ignored, or even its presence not known of. But the end section, "looking ahead," revealed the underlying flaw of his somewhat rambling book - (were these speeches? they read like it - but there's no evidence in the book these were lectures). He seems to have bought into the "promise" of biology, through psychopharmacology, to reveal human truths and expose our mystery, as it were. So his book reads as an elegy for the sacred, bowing to the human mind here where not before (Freud, Communism, etc.) But, he brought up biology in the first place, in the context of how we once thought state-control (fascism and communism) would forever crush the human spirit - and it did not. What happened to his argument in the case of biology? My own thought, is that he has chosen to make his home at Harvard, which is the nerve-center of the secular mind in this country. He seems to have no self-awareness of this, so accepts scientific biology (Harvard Med School stuff) as the final word -the death-knell of the sacred. This left me feeling very unsatisfied - some defender of the sacred here, he does not earn the high ground to diagnose "the secular mind".

Rating:
Summary: 2nd Grade theo-psychology
Review: Mr. Cole seems to know little or nothing about what the religious mind really is. He limits and trivializes the "religious mind" to going to church and saying our prayers. As if religion has no place in the other, "secular" world. I read the whole book in hopes that Mr Coles would make one interesting point. How disapointing