That exemplary sociologist of religion, David Martin, is mainly puzzled by John Gray's new book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.(While We're At It)(Book review)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, April, 2008 by Neuhaus, Richard John

That exemplary sociologist of religion, David Martin, is mainly puzzled by John Gray's new book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Gray is notorious for popping up in ideologically surprising places, usually in the mode of outraged indignation. This time Gray follows in the now well-worn path of Norman Cohn's 1957 classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, a book I regularly recommend to those who need it, which means most people interested in the interaction of politics and religion.

Martin says of Gray that "the ferocity of his indignation suggests that, occasionally, what is so obvious simply takes his breath away." Yet Black Mass provides some interesting twists. Martin writes: "In recent rhetorical practice the expansion of what we mean...