Two days after airplanes slammed into the twin towers, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, solemnly declared, "It is the end of the age of irony." Less than a week later, with his tongue back in his cheek, Carter explained that what he had meant to say was that it was the end of the age of ironing.

The Talmud has an expression for this: "He prophesied but did not know what he prophesied." Whatever may have been going through Carter's head, his original observation was important. During the 1990s, it had been clear that irony was in. Those in the know understood that there was nothing to know. Their philosopher was Richard Rorty (and Jerry Seinfeld was their comedian).

But on 9/11, the reality of fanaticism crashed headlong into irony. To many who had lost the habit of taking anything at all seriously, it suddenly seemed imperative to develop a better intellectual defense of what they held dear. The "New Atheists" appeared on the scene and renewed with a vengeance the debate between faith and reason, so long dismissed as a relic from a previous age. And conservative defenders of religion responded in kind.

Now William Egginton, who studied under Rorty and teaches at Johns Hopkins University, has entered the fray with his timely new book In Defense of Religious Moderation. Like the New Atheists, Egginton wants to fight fanaticism, but he wishes to do so without displaying the kind of close-mindedness that he believes is no less characteristic of religion's fiercest opponents than it is of the most dangerous fundamentalists. What the opposing camps share, he argues, is the belief that it is possible to attain absolute truth through a "code of codes." By this he means "the implicit and mostly unacknowledged belief that beyond the veil of how the world appears to us here and now, there is a deeper reality on which our lived reality is based, and most important, this deeper reality encodes our own." That is, it "consists of a potentially readable . . .

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