"Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant," Charles Murray writes. "For them, I think I have a story worth telling." Taking Religion Seriously is Murray's autobiographical account of a decades-long evolution in his stance toward the idea of God in general and Christianity specifically. He argues that religion is something that can be approached as an intellectual exercise. His account moves from the improbable physics of the Big Bang to recent discoveries about the nature of consciousness; from evolutionary psychology to hypotheses about a universal Moral Law. His exploration of Christianity delves into the authorship of the Gospels, the reliability of the texts that survive, and the scholarship surrounding the Resurrection story.
Murray, the author of Coming Apart and coauthor of The Bell Curve, does not write as an expert. "If you are taking religion seriously for the first time, you face the same problem I did: We are forced to decide what we make of a wide variety of topics that we do not have the option of mastering." He offers his personal example of how the process works. "Maybe God needs a way to reach over-educated agnostics and that's what I stumbled into," he writes. "It's a more arid process than divine revelation but it has been rewarding. And, if you're like me, it's the only game in town.""
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978-1-64177-486-4 (9781641774864)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
CHARLES MURRAY is a policy analyst educated at Harvard and MIT. He first came to national attention in 1984 with the publication of Losing Ground, which changed the national conversation about the reforms of the Sixties and their aftermath. His best-selling 1994 book, The Bell Curve, coauthored with Richard Herrnstein, argued that the increasing role of intelligence over the twentieth century was transforming America's social structure. In 2012, Coming Apart documented the growing divide between a new lower class and a new upper class that foreshadowed the political polarization of the 2016 election. His other books include In Pursuit (1988), Human Accomplishment (2003), Human Diversity (2020), and Facing Reality (2021). He is currently the Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
