If the summer, that has just started, has offered you scant amusements, let me offer a suggestion, read David Brooks’ essay titled  The Secular Society .  And experience an intellectual entertainment that demonstrates Mr. Brooks’ ability to trivialize and vulgarize the Book Report to the level of a cartoon, the genre made famous by that kitschmeister Walt Disney.

Perhaps, I was being a bit cynical but for some reason I consulted The Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot edited by Frank Kermode. And re- read ‘from The Idea of a Christian Society’ (1939). The short excerpt of that work that seemed to echo the un-reflective political,religious,moral conformity of Mr. Brooks. In fact thoughtlessness and abject conformity in the whole of life of both writers seems the leitmotif.  The argument, in sum, is that the answer to the conundrums of secularism is the re-invigoration of religious aspect of our communal lives.

Rootless Cosmopolitan