The Postmodern Condition As a Religious Revival: A Critical Review of William Connolly's Why I Am Not a Secularist, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, And Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction Much to the chagrin of skeptical philosophers from David Hume to Bertrand Russell, religion has withstood the onslaught of the Enlightenment project. Indeed, one of the benefits of Western culture's "postmodern condition" is that it has produced a revival of religion in the academic community. Modern thought, the brainchild of the Enlightenment, failed in its promise to emancipate humanity from the fetters of metaphysics. Given the scientific "rationalization" of war, genocide, the exploitative aspects of globalization in the twentieth century, and the collision of faiths in a post-9/11 world, it's understandable that many scholars express incredulity toward Reason's grand narrative. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer correctly put it in Dialectics of Enlightenment, "Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized." (1) "Enlightenment" became the very thing it tried to destroy: a religion. And in the course of this (not so) surprising discovery, what intellectuals once silenced as self-alienation and wish fulfillment is now clamoring for attention: religion demands integration.