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Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition
 
 
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Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition (Hardcover)

by Richard Holloway (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £14.99
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Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition + Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning + Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd (21 Aug 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1847672531
  • ISBN-13: 978-1847672537
  • Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 13.6 x 2.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 63,691 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

The Literary Review
'Holloway is able to offer a perspective on the intractably conflicted human animal that is consistently fresh and illuminating.'

Review
'Richard Holloway brilliantly illuminates the divided spirit of man.'

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Inside This Book (Learn More)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition
76% buy the item featured on this page:
Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
£14.24
Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning
11% buy
Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning 4.5 out of 5 stars (6)
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Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity
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Doubts and Loves: What is Left of Christianity 4.6 out of 5 stars (8)
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Between the Monster and the Saint: The Divided Spirit of Humanity
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Customer Reviews

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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A wise and compassionate reminder of how to live and behave, 14 Sep 2008
By Leo McMarley (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews
Richard Hollway is one of my very favourite moral thinkers, a man who over a number of accessible and engagingly written books (Godless Morality, Doubts and Loves, Looking in the Distance) has explored with great insight what it means to be human, both good and bad.

This new book of his focusses in particular on the human capacity for evil and is a real gem. Drawing on thinkers and writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Nietzsche, Auden, Ondaatje and Berger, he offers great insights into what it means to have faith in a world where religion continues to divide and damage, embracing his own stance as someone who feels that "after-religion" is where he is most comfortable. Or as he puts it "People in this position see religion as an entirely human construct, a work of the human imagination, but one that carries enduring meaning."

Holloway is a wonderful companion and you come out the other side of this book having felt like you have been in a long and effortless conversation with a man of great wisdom. If only more people had his broad-minded and warm-spirited outlook. He is someone whose words will stay with you a long time
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant, Eloquent and Erudite, 15 Nov 2008
By Mr. O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
A few years ago, good friends of mine asked me to be the godfather to their eldest son. Being of no fixed religious abode, after much thought I declined: I don't believe in God, and it seemed somehow dishonest to swear to uphold his values. Ever since, while not resiling from my atheist beliefs at all, I have regretted letting dear friends down in this way, without ever having been able to rationalise why: my reasoning felt earnest, logical and therefore, I thought, impeccable. Nonetheless, deep down I couldn't shake the feeling it was absolutely wrong.

It was, and this wonderful little book by Richard Holloway has helped me understand why.

Holloway is, or was, formerly Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church. More significantly, for the purposes of persuading your sceptical old goat of a correspondent, he's a learned, widely read and elegant writer who firmly sets his stall in the pragmatic, liberal tradition. Holloway appeals from the same quarter as the late Richard Rorty, and his underlying message resonates with Rorty's vision, eludicated in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity of a diverse community characterised by its members' freedom to invoke whatever stories they feel suitable to provide meaning to their lives but bound by common assent that, such freedoms notwithstanding, as Judith Shklar put it, "cruelty is the worst thing we do".

Holloway's disposition is to frame his moral worldview in terms of lessons that can be learned from literature, philosophy and myth (science, generally, not being much help for forming moral worldviews) and, as pragmatists tend not to be, he's not bothered that complete and coherent reconciliation of all the works of literature he might cite is not possible (Holloway's range of references is as broad as it is eclectic, covering (among many others) Homer, Plato, the Bible, Descartes, Shakespeare, Shelley, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams, Auden, Larkin, Rorty, Andrea Dworkin, Ridley Scott and Mike Newell - just try knitting that into a self-contained, consistent, coherent whole), provided that the parts he extracts, woven into the fabric of Holloway's philosophy, tell a meaningful story.

That is to say, provided our literature (however one might describe it) is deployed usefully in an instructive and metaphorical way, it doesn't matter that other aspects might suffer from internal logical inconsistencies or be at risk of factual falsification. To bother about such things is, to Richard Holloway, entirely to miss the point. And, while he (rightly) isn't mentioned even by name, anti-Christian aggravator-in-chief Richard Dawkins must surely be who Holloway has in mind when he alludes to the "particularly ugly debate" going on about this at the moment.

Instead, Holloway writes lyrically, elegantly, and forcefully about how we should be thinking about organising our lives, and his view is (quietly but convincingly) that science-toting pseudo-rationalists who seek societal Nirvana through squashing religions and other deemed irrationalities (Francis Wheen is, I suppose, another good example) are missing the point and poisoning the well from which, pragmatically, we all (religious or not) need to draw the water to irrigate our collective relations.

It is in the nature of his endeavour that Between the Monster and the Saint is a somewhat meandering journey, rather like the sort of woodland walk on which you can imagine Holloway embarking to ruminate on these verities, but it's also a short and sweetly written one, hearty and refreshing and, for me at least, it has had the restorative effect of a bracing excursion in a beautiful environment with a learned and thoughtful elder of the tribe.

I've made my apologies to my friends about the Christening, but I missed that boat. My loss. I won't do it again.

Olly Buxton
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