Beyond Consolation: How we became too "clever" for God and our own good

Beyond Consolation: How we became too "clever" for God and our own good by Waters, John. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781441114211.

In the late spring of 2008 the acclaimed Irish writer Nuala O Faolain went on a national Irish radio programme to tell the Irish people that she was dying of cancer. She was frightened of death and of the short time left to her. Here was a spokesperson for a generation which now conjured up an abyss for itself, reviewing a culture she had inhabited and helped to create one last time. She believed neither in an afterlife nor in God. With Nuala O Faolains broadcast as his point of departure, Waters examines this trajectory of Irish Culture to this point of despair. How reasonable is it to believe in nothing? He explores a new language to excavate the journey of Irish society from what appeared to be profound in its traditional faith to this moment of what might easily have been taken as a moment of nihilistic clarity. What modern men and women suffer from in modern culture is the lack of an idea of the infinite and the eternal.