We Get Pitches

A book publicist’s email in my inbox today:

I am the publicist representing White House aide, businessman and author Grady Means, who has drawn on his previous, best-selling books on economics and management (MetaCapitalism and Wisdom of the CEO) to write his latest book, The New Enlightenment (http://thenewenlightenmentbook.com/). It is a study of the toxic relationship between contemporary global politics and religion, something I though would interest you after reading some of your insightful, timely and convicted posts on Crooked Timber. Here’s a little more on the book:

The book starts with a return to basics and examines the spirit, God, good and evil, prayer, death, and deals with doctrine, politics, organization, ethics, religion as a proxy for tribal rivalry, science, sex, abortion, creationism, gender, superstition, and art. It suggests that heresy may be a required step to world peace … which is pretty much what Jesus said (in trying to strip a centuries-old crust of organization and rules off of religion and return it to the spirit). It is a merging of Rilke and Rumi.

The book then uses the concept of Theonomics, the Emergence and Rise of the Great Spiritual and Salvation Monopolies, to describe how we got here and where we are going. The book uses this “economic” framework of demand, supply, and pricing to take some of the emotion out of the issue. The book forecasts that violence, fundamentalism, and terrorism will get much worse before things get better: think of theologian Hans Kung channeling economist Gary Becker.

Finally the book returns to the spiritual and reasonable model of humans from the Enlightenment and how it led to the founding principles of America, and describes how to address the historical conflict between culture and civilization and to begin to back away from the precipice: consider modern historian Paul Johnson channeling Thomas Jefferson.

The book is set to release in January. If you are interested in receiving a pre-publication copy, please contact me or visit the website (http://thenewenlightenmentbook.com/).

If merging Rilke and Rumi, Hans Kung channeling Gary Becker and Spanker Johnson channeling Thomas Jefferson are your things, consider yourself enlightened about where to find ’em. Me – I’ll be otherwise occupied writing convicted posts.