The Year of Our Lord 1943
Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals-Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others-sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.
In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. Working mostly separately and in ignorance of one another's ideas, the five developed a strikingly consistent argument that the only means by which democratic societies could be prepared for their world-wide economic and political dominance was through a renewal of education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jacobs (How to Think), professor of humanities at Baylor University, explores the response of Christian humanists to the global conflagration of WWII in this precise survey. Jacobs focuses on five well-known figures: W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil. Though four of them are white men, they do represent both Catholic and Protestant thought, and were not all in agreement. Taking the year 1943 as a pivot point when the military victory of the allied forces seemed likely, the work considers how Auden, Eliot, Lewis, Maritain, Weil, and their circles made sense of the war and their moral responsibilities during and after the conflict. The book is structured around the questions they posed, and proposed answers to, including: Is our cause just? What is the use of scholarship in wartime? What is the role of the supernatural in worldly evil? What is the role of moral force when confronting new, dangerous technologies? Is patriotism perverse? And what is the place of Christian, humanist education in constructing a more peaceful world? While Jacobs can only begin to scratch the surface of such complex debates, his book is an erudite collective portrait of postwar Christian intellectuals.
