The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (Hardback)

Chapter One

The Modern Impasse:
Living Without Roots

A spiritual crisis has followed in the wake of the modern scientific era. Many people question whether the wisdom of the human past can be recovered and whether that wisdom is necessary (or even valid) for the third millennium. This is the setting to which I respond in these chapters.

THE HIGH COST OF MODERN LIVING
The modern period spans the time from 1789 to 1989-that is, the time from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It extends from the beginning of the Enlightenment to the collapse of the Enlightenment. That period characteristically embraced a secular worldview that once cast a long ideological spell-but has now fallen into irreversible decline. Some will take issue with the simplicity of my definition of the modern period, but it provides a window-from the Bastille to the Berlin Wall-through which a clear picture can be seen.

The Challenge of Modern Rootlessness
The naturalism of Freud is no longer marketable as a reliable therapy, because rigorous studies of its effectiveness have shown it to be terribly inefficient. The utopianism of Marx has collapsed from St. Petersburg to Havana. The narcissism of Nietzsche no longer has sufficient moral power to be taken seriously in Western culture, as it was before Hitler and Cambodia ...