Slavoj Zizek has been called &quot;an academic rock star&quot; and &quot;the wild man of theory&quot;; his writing mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in order to dissect current intellectual pieties. In <i>The Puppet and the Dwarf</i> he offers a close reading of today's religious constellation from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. He critically confronts both predominant versions of today's spirituality&mdash;New Age gnosticism and deconstructionist-Levinasian Judaism&mdash;and then tries to redeem the &quot;materialist&quot; kernel of Christianity. His reading of Christianity is explicitly political, discerning in the Pauline community of believers the first version of a revolutionary collective. Since today even advocates of Enlightenment like Jurgen Habermas acknowledge that a religious vision is needed to ground our ethical and political stance in a &quot;postsecular&quot; age, this book&mdash;with a stance that is clearly materialist and at the same time indebted to the core of the Christian legacy&mdash;is certain to stir controversy.