Books, Arts & Manners: Speak No Evil

Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie, by Leonard W. Levy (Knopf, 688 pp., $35)

THE bulk of this bulky volume is devoted to cataloguing and condemning religious intolerance and persecution throughout history—with overwhelming emphasis on the history of Western Christendom, and especially the Anglo-American world. Leonard Levy, a distinguished scholar of the American Constitution and a First Amendment specialist, also celebrates civilization’s “inchmeal” progress toward complete freedom of expression “in the field of religious belief and experience,” an achievement that is essential to “intellectual liberty in general.” On the whole, Blasphemy exhibits a fairness and a breadth of sympathies that transcend the parochialism of modern liberalism; in key respects, however, it reveals liberalism’s intellectual limits in dealing with religion.

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Matthew Berke

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Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie, by Leonard W. Levy (Knopf, 688 pp., $35)

THE bulk of this bulky volume is devoted to cataloguing and condemning religious intolerance and persecution throughout history—with overwhelming emphasis on the history of Western Christendom, and especially the Anglo-American world. Leonard Levy, a distinguished scholar of the American Constitution and a First Amendment specialist, also celebrates civilization’s “inchmeal” progress toward complete freedom of expression “in the field of religious belief and experience,” an achievement that is essential to “intellectual liberty in general.” On the whole, Blasphemy exhibits a fairness and a breadth of sympathies that transcend the parochialism of modern liberalism; in key respects, however, it reveals liberalism’s intellectual limits in dealing with religion.