Books May 1992
Song of himself: Harold Bloom on God
A review of The American Religion by Harold Bloom.
Once a Romantic, always a Romantic. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University as well as Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English at New York University, was at one time a literary critic with a special interest in Romanticism. In his new book, The American Religion,1 he attempts to do for American religion what he once did for literature: rewrite it with himself as the hero. In pursuit of this Romantic calling, Professor Bloom argues that there is such a thing as an American Religion and that it transcends all denominational barriers. According to Bloom, American Religion is defined not by a distinctive theology but by the unmediated experience of the self as God. The “American finds God in herself or himself,” he writes, a feat accomplished...
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