"Few people in modern Europe now understand how urgent these arguments were in the sixteenth century. That urgency gave rise to what has been called 'theological road rage'..."

The quote above is from the book, and is included in an excellent Washington Post review, which is reprinted in full (it seems) on Amazon. In stark contrast to these concerns, whatever was all the rage back then, the following ironic-zen-found-art juxtaposition appeared on the same editorial page. The postmodern is marked and inflected by, among other things, accidental pastiche, serendipitous auto-bricolage, strange conjunctions of the profound and the ridiculous. Take me, for instance. I woke at 2:30 or so and have since been wondering whether the real dark night of the soul is at three AM or four AM, and whether this takes time zones and daylight savings schemes into account. It felt more like dark night of the soul lite, but I think that might have been because I was not experiencing it in its proper time slot. Listening to the BBC, letting my cat out, wondering what happened to the life I thought was who I am. As Country Joe sang so long ago: "who am I / who sit and wonder / who wait / as the wheels of fate / slowly grind my life away..." Does this represent a spiritual crisis, as I thought a couple-three years ago, or is it, as Dylan once said, what salvation must feel like after a while? So much time, so little love. I remember standing on an overpass at night when I was maybe 14, my daughter Selene's age today, watching all the cars rushing by below, going places I could only imagine. One day soon, I thought, I'll be going places too. And I have. I look out at the stars tonight, the mountains just now reappearing in the first light of dawn. There is a terrible sadness in me for what is lost. Though I can't even say what that was. It's like being haunted by myself, whatever that is. It's not as if I don't see the humor in it, the funny signals this heterogeneous multi-vocal world keeps sending out. But beneath that always is the ache of separation. From what, from whom? You were ghost to my ghost, a flicker in some larger imagination that seemed for a moment to hold us both. I suppose I must "move on," as they say. But this haunted house that seems so often to be who I am today is loathe to let me go until I've plumbed its gnarly secrets. And that seems like a lifetime effort. As the Stones said in one of their spookier bits: I am waiting...