I first read some of Eagleton’s work when I was in graduate school, and I began to use his best-selling Literary Theory: An Introduction2 in the new “Contemporary Literary Theory and Criticism” course I created shortly after I began teaching at Santa Clara University in 1987. My students, often initially baffled by the complexities of the primary texts we read, have appreciated Eagleton’s lucid and engaging primer on theories ranging from New Criticism and structuralism to psychoanalysis, as well as his openness about his own Marxist perspective. Since I have read other work by Eagleton over the years, I was delighted to learn that he would be speaking at Santa Clara this past fall, but was a bit surprised that his talk would be on “Why Is God for Christians Good for Nothing?” rather than on Marxist literary or cultural studies.