In distinctive voice and tone, cultural commentator Glenn W. Olsen presents his latest work on the place of Catholicism in American history. Here he clarifies the meaning of American modernity for Catholics and shows the conflicts and tensions confronting the religious person today.
“Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under conditions of modern life—some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time. But it also provides a warning that a religion unable to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars against an enveloping secular culture is destined for oblivion. “Glenn Olsen’s book could hardly be more pivotal or insightful. Confronting the growing amnesia regarding culture’s religious origin and transcendent purpose, Olsen proves both a masterful cartographer of modernity and a visionary of a culture that encourages and enables us to seek beyond ourselves.” —Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus “A brilliant book. It rests on an amazing amount of scholarship that is wide-ranging in history, literature, art, science, music, theology, and philosophy.” —James Hitchcock, professor of history, St. Louis University
In distinctive voice and tone, cultural commentator Glenn W. Olsen presents his latest work on the place of Catholicism in American history. Here he clarifies the meaning of American modernity for Catholics and shows the conflicts and tensions confronting the religious person today.
A highly regarded historian and professor presents a sustained reflection on the meaning of the Church's life in time. Divided into five parts, each section takes up a period of Church history and considers how the developments in church history relate to the Church today. From doctrines to customs, Olsen examines both the theological and historical impact of each new development. Beginning with ancient Christianity, the author illustrates how both secularization and sacralization take place in history and how it corresponds to our own age. Taking the reader from late ancient and early medieval Christianity, to the full bloom of medieval scholasticism and scholarship, to the dawn of the Renaissance and the aggressively anti-religious time of the "Enlightenment", Olsen considers all aspects of every age. The final section is a discussion of the Church in our own time, confronting such problems as modernization and the relation of the Church to culture. Appendices expand on The Catechism of the Catholic Church's teaching on the relation between prayer and history.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being sinful and worthless and 10 being absolutely perfect and righteous, how do you rate yourself, really? On that same scale, how does God rate you? The Alpha Series is a systematic study of all that God has done to make you a 10 and a course on how you can begin to see yourself the way God sees you. Knowing what God thinks about us gives us a choice in what we are going to believe about ourselves. Believing what God says he made us to be allows us the hope we need to cope with life. The joyful, confident expectation about our own future gives us the liberty to care about others. The Alpha Series may be used as a counseling model, a discipleship course, a faith based recovery tool, and a training curriculum. Along with the companion workbook it is suitable as basic curricula for all types of study groups and recovery programs.
“Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under conditions of modern life—some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time. But it also provides a warning that a religion unable to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars against an enveloping secular culture is destined for oblivion. “Glenn Olsen’s book could hardly be more pivotal or insightful. Confronting the growing amnesia regarding culture’s religious origin and transcendent purpose, Olsen proves both a masterful cartographer of modernity and a visionary of a culture that encourages and enables us to seek beyond ourselves.” —Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus “A brilliant book. It rests on an amazing amount of scholarship that is wide-ranging in history, literature, art, science, music, theology, and philosophy.” —James Hitchcock, professor of history, St. Louis University
Supper at Emmaus traces various important intellectual topics from the ancient world to the modern period. Generally, as in its treatment of the question of whether the long-standing contrast between cyclical and linear views of history is helpful, it introduces important thinkers who have considered the question. A preoccupation of the book is the appearance and reappearance across the centuries of patterns used to organize temporal and cultural experience. After an opening essay on transcendental truth and cultural relativism, the second chapter traces a distinction, common in historical writings during the past two centuries, between an alleged ancient classical "cyclic" view of time and history, used to describe the claimed repetitiveness of and similarities between historical events ("nothing is new under the sun"), and a contrasting Jewish-Christian linear view, sometimes described as providential in that it moves through a series of unique events to some end intended by God. In the latter, history is "about something," the education of the human race or the redemption of humankind. As in each of the remaining essays, the book then attempts to draw out the limitations of what the current consensus on this topic has become. It does this for such things as our current understanding of religious toleration, humanism, natural law, and teleology. Some of the essays, such as those on debate about Augustine's understanding of marriage or the concluding illustrated essay on the baroque city of Lecce, are published for the first time. Others are based on previously published contributions to the scholarly literature, though generally each of these chapters concludes with a postscript that engages with current scholarly debate on the subject.
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