Complete review from Reverend Stephen McCarthy ’06, Groton School Quarterly(Fall 2018)

“What is a chef doing among the intellectual luminaries, authors, and Nobel Prize winners collected in The Secular Saints: And Why Morals are Not Just Subjective? Following chapters exploring the thought of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Ludwig von Mises, among others, the inclusion of chef Edna Lewis (no relation to the author) came as something of a surprise.

For those unfamiliar with her (as I was before reading this book), Edna Lewis did more than anyone to put the cuisine of the American South at the forefront of the American culinary scene. And if you share doubts of the kind I once had as a New Englander dispatched to Alabama for his first job after seminary, I can assure you hers is an enduring legacy; just this year the James Beard Foundation named Highlands Bar & Grill, a Birmingham restaurant with a gourmet take on Southern classics, the most outstanding in America. Yet, in an important way, Edna Lewis’ labor and distinguished life are perhaps most suited to a book which, much like an excellent dinner party, gathers interesting personalities and invites them to engage with one another—in this case over the perennial question of how an individual is to lead a good life, a moral life.

Hunter Lewis does not limit his invitation to “secular sainthood” to those with animosity toward revealed religion—indeed, several of those featured expressed Christian commitments. Rather, he makes his criteria that they lived their lives and expressed their thoughts in ways independent of organized religion. Collectively, the author poses this motivating question: “Is it possible to establish a credible moral, ethical, philosophical system outside of religion? And if so, what would it look like?” The human tendency to seek group identity through adversarial self-definition, or what Mr. Lewis calls “tribalism,” has given rise to an environment in which this project feels especially pressing. The public has a strong appetite for such exploration—whether approached from the right, as by University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson, or from the mainstream left, as by Columbia Professor Mark Lilla. TheSecular Saints has a distinctive contribution to make to this discussion, firmly situated as it is in the tradition of classical liberalism.

The Secular Saints does not merely introduce various figures and their biographies; more often than not, it introduces salient quotations from their own writings. The ad fontes spirit of this approach should feel familiar to Grotties of all generations. The result is that, like at any good dinner party, different guests sparkle to varying degrees, often depending more on the incidentals of company and conversation than on their innate character. We can also thus encounter them in unexpected ways, as when we discover economist Adam Smith on the defensive, or hear philosopher David Hume expound on economics and religion, rather than epistemology more generally. Among the philosophers, Montaigne positively dazzles with the appeal of a bon vivant; and Epicurus speaks with the same verve Mr. Tulp communicated when I first encountered him by way of Lucretius in Fourth Form Latin; while Immanuel Kant remains as implacably earnest and Teutonic as he ever was in Mr. Seeley’s Sixth Form Ethics course.

Establishing the objectivity of morality is a tall order for any volume; and, while advocating for this, The Secular Saints leaves it up to the individual reader to draw conclusions about details—befitting its classical liberal affinities, and whetting the reader’s appetite for more. Happily, the first chapter offers a concise introduction to some of the leading ethical theorists of the present. However, with the exception of Alasdair MacIntyre, the book passes over those whose approaches are more engaged with the Christian tradition (e.g. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Taylor). Those stimulated to seek further programmatic treatment of these themes might turn to Hunter Lewis’ A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives; or the Dutch legal theorist Andreas Kinneging’s The Geography of Good and Evil. Accepting the invitation to spend time with The Secular Saints affords readers the opportunity to meet interesting historical personalities whose relevance is undiminished today.”