(DOWNLOAD) "Behind the Barricades with Lenin? Making Sense of the Marxist Turn to Christianity in the Literature Classroom (Vladimir Lenin) (Viewpoint Essay)" by Christianity and Literature # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Behind the Barricades with Lenin? Making Sense of the Marxist Turn to Christianity in the Literature Classroom (Vladimir Lenin) (Viewpoint Essay)
- Author : Christianity and Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Religion & Spirituality,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 82 KB
Description
During the spring semester of my third year in graduate school, I began hearing strange grumblings from the underground about two notable Marxist scholars of the early modern and premodern periods converting to the Christian religion. Why, so many around me were asking, would the most radical of radicals relent to that oppressive and hegemonic institution, the Christian Church? To that point in life, I had not given much thought to the philosophical and ideological correspondences of what at the time seemed--at least, to me--to be two disparate worldviews. Marxism was unequivocally materialist, political, and antireligious, or so I thought. Who can, after all, forget its chief architect's famous dictum that religion was the "opiate" of the masses? In our time, however, the ascendancy of this dictum was suddenly being questioned by Marx's own followers, some of whom were converting publicly to the Christian faith, and I was intrigued by the thought of these two scholarly converts being sojourners of sorts, making their way through a number of postmodern spiritual "religions" before finding their permanent home in a full-blown orthodox and "hegemonic" Christianity. What did this Western institution have to offer these Marxist materialists that other religions did not? At the time I was asking this question, I also had begun to hear that Terry Eagleton was reevaluating the significance of his Catholic upbringing in his autobiography, The Gatekeeper; French philosopher Alain Badiou was arguing that the Christian experience was a necessary means to reintroduce the invaluable and indispensable concept of "Truth" in philosophical discourse; and the Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek was writing at length about the Marxist need to ally with Christianity in order to ensure the survival of the materialist critique, claiming that "there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism" and that "Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade" (The Fragile Absolute 2).