|
Product Description
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism―all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.
Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science―as the source of all truth―necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.
The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
- From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church
- The Portable Enlightenment Reader (Portable Library)
- Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures
- Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition
- Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John
- The Theology of the Book of Revelation (New Testament Theology)
- Gospel of John (Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture)
- The Priestly Office: A Theological Reflection
- The European Reformations Sourcebook
*If this is not the "The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Oct 27, 2024 10:18 +08.