Summary

In "Piety Without Content," a very short essay opening the final section of the book, Sontag for the first time turns to the subject of religion. She does this by way of a highly critical review of a recent book by Walter Kaufmann. On Sontag's reading, Kaufmann's work is representative of a sloppy and intellectually haphazard American trend that amounts to a type of "piety without content" or "a religiosity without either faith or observance" (250). Because this trend exhibits no real allegiance to any sort of content, one is free to borrow or cherry-pick from a variety of religious traditions with impunity. For Sontag, this amount to a form of religion by assemblage that is both intellectually dishonest and, in its negligence of context, historically short-sighted. Such a project may be insightful for sociological or moral reasons, but it cannot be called religious because...