Mounir Fatmi repeatedly hits a nerve with both believers and nonbelievers. Religion is never far off in work that often seems as dark as it does hopeful – it’s just a matter of how you look at it.

In January, the British literary theorist and philosopher, Terry Eagleton, will be speaking on religion in the lecture series, Now is the Time, in Amsterdam. As an introduction, here is an intellectual portrait of a thinker who is known as one of Great Britain's most vehement polemicists.