Marshall Berman, the American cultural critic and political theorist best known for his 1982 study of modernism, All that is Solid Melts into Air, died on 11 September aged 72. In 2009, he wrote a brief response to a piece in New Humanist by Danny Postel, in which Postel asked what books he could give to his children to counteract the influence of religious texts. It’s worth republishing here, as an insight into Berman’s thinking:
“Look,” [Berman] wrote to me, “the Bible is a collection of thousands of stories, many told from ambiguous and conflicting points of view, some as rich and profound as any poem or novel, and thrilling to read regardless of your theology. People have spent thousands of years engaged in dialogue about what the stories mean. Why don’t you make yourself part of this dialogue? Here’s an interesting question for the whole family to talk about: in Genesis, when God condemns and punishes people for things they’ve done, hasn’t God himself set them up for a fall? Cain and Abel being the most blatant case, but there are plenty more. But to get in on the dialogue, you gotta read the stories yourself!”
You can read a tribute to Berman and his work by Jonathan Derbyshire over at Prospect, here.
