Prospect magazine recently asked its contributors to name the most overrated and underrated cultural events of the year. I picked the following:
Overrated
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic). For all the shapeliness of his sentences, Hitchens’s pamphleteering on behalf of the “new atheism” is superficial, complacent and historically undernourished.Underrated
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Harvard). Charles Taylor’s gargantuan philosophical history of modernity, which complicates the flattering and simplified story we like to tell ourselves about secularisation, is a major intellectual event. Somehow, it hasn’t yet been recognised as such.
You can read the other nominations here.