
Michael Jackson's latest book,
The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real, is
reviewed in an essay on the philosophy of religion in the December 11 issue of the
Times Literary Supplement. Reviewer Jonathan Benthall writes, "Michael Jackson’s sixty-one short essays, based on his experiences in disparate geographical settings, are designed to speak to each reader individually like a sophisticated musical composition, rather than advancing a linear argument." He continues, "Jackson’s case that ‘history, religion, spirituality, culture are shop-worn terms,’ and should be replaced by ‘the image of life at the edge of language, a shoreline on which the sea washes ceaselessly,’ is given substance by his own literary skill. And it is possible to glimpse here the makings of a shared ‘religious’ sensibility that may be fitfully emerging to unite different peoples and traditions, in ways influenced by, but not entirely decreed by, the gods of the marketplace."