Not that anyone asked me, but I was appalled by Michael Kinsley’s “cover” review (entitled “God, Distrust”) of the new Christopher Hitchens book (God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review.

It's one thing for the NYT Book Review to be so very brave as to get one avowed atheist to review a book by another avowed atheist, and even have the reviewer crow about it in the review itself. Very brave, indeed.

But it's another for the reviewer to spend half the review talking about the author, another third of it talking about himself, and hardly any of it talking about the book. Kinsley does admit in passing that Hitchens really has no argument, so perhaps that’s why the book goes mostly undescribed. But he praises it anyway! This is a little like saying, rub my belly the way I like it rubbed and I won’t care if you’re hideous or fall-down drunk.

I suppose it's appropriate, in a way, that we should be treated to a glib and unserious review about a glib and unserious book in an all too often lately glib and unserious venue. But whatever happened to real engagement on the matter of faith and philosophy? We in what used to be called the West seem mostly unable to discuss this subject at all, at least in the chic print and electronic salons of our most prestigious literati. What passes for public discourse on this subject today is simply pathetic compared to standard 19th- and early 20th-century fare. (Does this have any bearing, one has to wonder, on our proverbial “hearts and minds” problem with the Muslim world?)