New Definition, Same Old Story

J.-B. Madou, Le bon conseil (Good Advice), 1871. Public domain image courtesy loki 11 and Wikimedia Commons. If the title of a book a friend recently gave me was intended to be provocative, that intention surely succeeded for yours truly—because the assertion that Life’s too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious certainly raised this reader’s hackles. The title feels like a familiar accusation, thrown at you via the representative of an aggressively evangelical branch of Christianity, say the member of a campus group who approaches you out of nowhere to lay out all your wrongheadedness and their possession of every last answer. But with the recognition that “religious” or “religion” is such a broad term, one that means any number of things to different people, one of the tasks author David Dark sets out before launching into his claim is nailing down a working definition of said term. Dark describes religion as “perceived necessity; it is that which a person perceives as needful in…