I am reading, absorbing, and reflecting on Talal's essay, “Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein,” in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that has enveloped the world in spring 2020 COVID-19 has stopped ordinary activity almost everywhere, including the United States and North Carolina, where I live and from where I am writing The beauty of Talal's essay is its frontal engagement with big ideas, major thinkers, and long-term processes that most scholars ignore or deal with tangentially Modernity is on trial, as is Western philosophy, science, and translation Linguistics is foregrounded, via Wittgenstein and others, ethics are redeployed through MacIntyre, and Qurʾanic idioms are reinvested with fresh meaning in English In what follows, I want to explore four themes—namely, modern thought, barzakh, conscience, and community—that
Writing in the Eye of the Storm