A reflection after reading After the Death of God, by Caputo, Vattimo and Robbins:

“The cover of After the Death of God represents well the very ideas contained within the book. The imagery itself is striking: a complete solar eclipse, with the moon covering the entirety of the sun and the sun reaching out past the fringes of that which seeks to cover it. A better image for the more recent history of philosophy cannot be imagined. The eclipse of the metaphysical God has long been heralded as the death of religion, as the death of magic and supernaturalism that has now cleared the way for humanity’s return to the natural, to something outside the binding and totalitarian fixtures of religion. But that message has grown tired as of late; though its harbingers may have wished its duration permanent, the eclipsing entity has waned, revealing a new and different God who no longer shines with metaphysical certainty but solicits with unequivocal intensity. The image itself, poised with possibility and perhaps even danger, asks the question posed by the title of the book: after the death of God, what? After the eclipsing body wanes, what? For on the other side of the eclipse, after the brief triumphalism of the autumnal experience, the sun shines through. This is certainly not to say that the metaphysical God remains; speaking perspectivally, just as the power and awe of the sun is tempered for the viewer by its ability to be eclipsed, shut out, and temporarily erased, the power, or perhaps the supposed ontological reality of the metaphysical God is tempered, even permanently muted by its own eclipsing. Our new perspective on the sun is analogous to our new perspective on God.”