Title:  Opening Doors: Thought From (and of) the Outside Author:  Garry Watson Imprint:  The Davies Group, Publishers soft cover 284 pp. $27.00 US ISBN 978-1-888570-06-4 2008 Opening Doors hopes to reach readers who are either hostile to, or indifferent to, religion—with the aim, not of converting them, but of encouraging them to rethink the subject. Believers should also find much to interest them. Opening Doors begins with a polemical introduction in which Watson explains where he agrees with—also, more importantly, where he differs from—the currently popular New Atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens etc.). Opening Doors may be the most provocative intervention yet made in the context of the recent philosophical turn to religion. Reviving the case made by the now largely forgotten literary critic, F.R.Leavis, for the novelists D.H.Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, Watson brings these writers into a conversation about religion with Derrida, Levinas and Agamben, arguing that when read together these most unlikely bedfellows help us revitalize our thinking.  “A deeply serious book—a rehabilitation of F.R. Leavis as an ethical thinker, a rereading of novelists important to Leavis, principally George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and D.H. Lawrence—that deserves the attention of critics in the Anglo-American tradition.” — J. M. Coetzee, author of (among others) Waiting for the Barbarians, Age of Iron, Disgrace  Contents: Preface: A different kind of meditation Part One: Introductory Chapter One    A polemical clearing of the ground Chapter Two    Why We Need to Rethink Religion Part Two: The Outside Chapter Three  Shifting Focus from the “Outsider” to the “Outside” Chapter Four   Thought from (and of) the outside: Lawrence, Levinas and Derrida on the Firing Line Chapter Five    Thought from (and of) the outside: Abraham, Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” and Hospitality Chapter Six       Balancing as we go: slave or noble? Abrahamic or Hellenic?                       Chapter Seven  Conclusion: “Driv[ing] on to the edge of the unknown, and beyond” Notes Name index Subject index The Author: Garry Watson (PhD University of Sussex) teaches film and early 20th century English and American literature in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He has published essays in such journals as English and Cambridge Quarterly (in the UK), The Compass, University of Toronto Quarterly, Cineaction, English Studies in Canada  (Canada), Études Lawrenciennes  (in France) and College English (in the US). He is the author of The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real (2004), The Leavises, The “Social,” and the Left (1977), and co-editor (with M. Elizabeth Sargent) of Approaches to Teaching D.H.Lawrence  (MLA. 2001).