667 - From Fantasy to Faith

From Fantasy to Faith
By D. Z. Phillips
New York, St. Martin's Press, 1991. 224 pp. $39.95.

D. Z. Phillips is a Welsh philosopher of religion with a long-standing interest in literature. As he has done in a number of other books, he here uses modern writers to uncover, in Wittgensteinian fashion, what is distinctive about religious language. He takes up four issues that divide the book into parts: Has the human race outgrown religion? What authority is left to the rules of morality without God? Must morality be religious? Can a religious perspective incorporate the fact of human suffering without explaining it away?

In ten-page essays, Phillips engages twentieth-century authors in reflection on these questions. The essays are readable (based as they are on radio lectures) and serve as brief introductions to the work of some twenty-one writers. In addition to familiar figures such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway,

668 - From Fantasy to Faith

Albert Camus, and Flannery O'Connor, Phillips takes up such less discussed writers as Dennis Potter, Caradoc Evans, Alice Munroe, and R. S. Thomas.

I found the book to be stimulating but uneven. Phillips can be insightful on a point, such as the folly of claiming that Christian discipleship coincides with self-interest, but this work is not thorough or systematic enough to be completely satisfying on any of the issues it raises. I think the book is of most use read in snippets; it could be a welcome source of sermon illustrations or a helpful guide to writers worth sustained attention.

John Sykes
Wingate College
Wingate, NC.