When Religion Had a Mind
At The New Republic, Peter E. Gordon reviews Carlos Fraenkel’s new book Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza, which explores the historical roots of philosophical religion and its implications today. “But if Fraenkel is right,” Gordon writes, “…Our own egalitarianism, in other words, is an obstruction to the kind of contextualist pluralism once upheld by the most subtle thinkers of the Abrahamic religions. The most zealous advocates for religion today are populists and literalists, and they have abandoned the principles of interpretation that made philosophical religion a possibility.”