2024.12. : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 150pp., $12.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781108995016.
Reviewed by David McPherson, University of Florida
Philosophers have not always looked kindly on the religious life, particularly when understood as a vowed ascetic way of life of the sort undertaken by priests, monks, and nuns, who profess vows of poverty, celibacy, and obedience. One thinks of Hume’s remarks about the uselessness of “the monkish virtues” (1751, sect. IX) or Nietzsche’s criticisms of “the ascetic priest” as embodying an unhealthy, life-denying will-to-power (1887, third essay). It is refreshing, therefore, to find a philosopher defending the religious life, as Zena Hitz does in her new book. Hitz continues the autobiographical style of philosophizing she used in her widely read previous book Lost in Thought, but here she draws on her experience of discerning the religious life to reveal…
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