John Carroll (author)

John Carroll (born 1944) is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, and author of "Puritan", "Paranoid", "Remissive", "Guilt", "Ego and Soul", "Humanism: The Rebirth and Wreck of Western Culture", and "Intruders In The Bush: The Australian Quest For Identity".

"Humanism" is Carroll's most ambitious work to date. Predicated on the view that Western culture is in a declining mode, "Humanism" traces this decline to an epistemological tyranny of reason and its subjection of other forms of knowing and understanding being. Carroll's often bleak diagnosis is primarily based on unique readings of canonic theological, philosophical and artistic texts including those by Sophocles, Calvin, Holbein, Donatello, Shakespeare, Rembrant, Poussin, Henry James and John Ford. The heart of the book's analysis being highly indebted to Nietzsche's critique of "Socratic" culture in the "The Birth of Tragedy".

Although "Humanism" appears at first glance to have diagnostic affinities with works inspired by American neoconservatism, for example Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind", Carroll's work also illustrates tendencies that do not easily fit with conservatism as it is traditionally defined. In the prescriptive works, "The Western Dreaming" and "The Existential Jesus" for example, Carroll rereads Gospel narratives and the ontology of Christ through a Heideggerian and non-theistic lens.

References

*Intruders In The Bush: The Australian Quest For Identity, John Carroll, ISBN 0-19-553374-7

*John Carroll on Philip Rieff [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1690308.htm]

*John Carroll discusses the re-release of Humanism in 2004 [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt/stories/s1153654.htm]

*Carroll discussing The Existential Jesus [http://www.abc.net.au/rn/perspective/stories/2007/1881859.htm]

*Review of Existential Jesus [http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21334991-5003900,00.html]