Is There a Sabbath for Thought?
Between Religion and Philosophy
This book can be opened with
Seeking to renew an ancient companionship between the philosophical and
the religious, this book’s meditative chapters dwell on certain elemental
experiences or happenings that keep the soul alive to the enigma of the divine.
William Desmond engages the philosophical work of Pascal, Kant, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Shestov, and Soloviev, among others, and pursues with a philosophical
mindfulness what is most intimate in us, yet most universal: sleep, poverty,
imagination, courage and witness, reverence, hatred and love, peace and war.
Being religious has to do with that intimate universal, beyond arbitrary
subjectivism and reductionist objectivism.
In this book, he attempts to look at religion with a fresh and open mind,
asking how philosophy might itself stand up to some of the questions posed to
it by religion, not just how religion might stand up to the questions posed to it by
philosophy. Desmond tries to pursue a new and different policy, one faithful
to the light of this dialogue.