The God That Did Not Fail

Secular humanists and other progressives have been predicting the demise of religion for the past 250 years. But they keep running into a problem--those who were supposed to be liberated by secular gospel that God is Dead aren't buying it. Why not? Since the Greeks and Romans, as Robert Royal explains, religion has nurtured the development of the individual and of Western culture itself. Christianity and Judaism collaborated to create a dialogue between faith and reason that determined the history of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, and several Enlightenments, including our current postmodern moment. Royal concludes that modern democratic societies are intimately tied to a Christian view of the dignity of the human person and the health and survival of free institutions.

Royal (The Pope's Army ) seeks to engage contemporary culture and civilization in a dialog that underscores the central importance of religion and religious thought in Western civilization despite apparently increasing secularization that has been influenced by advances in science, technology, certain philosophical discourse (e.g., existentialism, Marxism), and naturalist psychology as advocated by Freud. In essence, the book is a response to those that argue for science's preeminence in books such as Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason and A.N. Wilson's God's Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization . While Royal's argument is not original, he does present a well-articulated synthesis of mostly sec­ondhand sources that address the major historical developments in Western civilization from ancient Greece to our contemporary world. His writing is accessible and aimed at a general audience. The book's key weakness is that while it purports to be an intellectual history of religion's role in Western civilization, in reality it is a meditative reflection designed to engender discussion and dialog. As such, it is recommended with reservations to comprehensive religion collections only.â€"Pius Charles Murray, Boston Univ. Sch. of Theology Lib.

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