Post Mortem

Culture and the Death of God
by Terry Eagleton

Yale University Press, 2014
(234 pages, $26.00, hardcover)

reviewed by Graeme Hunter

There is a fashionable way to write cultural history and it has two non-negotiable rules. The first is to treat the "death of God" as a historical event of the late nineteenth century. Under no circumstances must you point out, or even seem to suspect, that God is not the kind of being who could die. For example, the cultural historian Peter Watson has written a 600-page history of recent thought with the subtitle: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God. And in all those hundreds of surprisingly interesting pages it never occurs to Watson to wonder what kind of death God died. Was it prolonged or painful? Did he die in good spirits or was he afraid?