Iranian-American Reza Aslan isn’t only a sociology of religion scholar, he’s a professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside. And this shines through in God: A Human History. “[H]is writing is inarguably kick-ass,” Randy Rosenthal avows in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “and so his God is simply much more pleasurable to read” than others of its ilk. But beware: as Rachel Newcomb writes for The Washington Post, “Aslan’s fluid writing style makes the reader…accept his assertions on faith alone.”
And they’d be? “The author seems anxious to shock readers,” Kirkus Reviews warrants, “with his argument that God is in everything. ‘I am,’ he writes dramatically, ‘in my essential reality, God made manifest. We all are.’” Which has Rosenthal remark, “Aslan’s idea essentially negates the religious beliefs of every traditional culture in the world.” In The New York Times, Emma Green puts it this way: “Aslan tells a…tale with the goal of proving his own beliefs.”
Still, the author “takes readers on a historic journey to trace the idea of God” [Kirkus Reviews]. And, in so doing, tells “the story of how humans have created God with a capital-G,” Rosenthal reports, adding, “it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”
God: A Human History
By Reza Aslan
Random House, 2018
