In Beyond Modernity, Father Rutler shows the emptiness and vanity of modern man's attempts to deify progress and look at modernity as a goal in itself. Written in a style reminiscent of Chesterton, this book is a theological and sociological commentary on the bankruptcy of progressivism.

"The modern age is becoming outmoded, the thing it thought most unlikely. This poses a problem overwhelming to set minds: what happens when the age which was supposed to be the end of all the ages ends itself? The stark reply is, modern man is the least equipped to know. While posturing as the breath of things to come, he was insinuating the first civilized denial of the future. Modernity is worse than a rejection of the past; it is a defiant avoidance of that which is next, probably the first school of discourse to cancel tomorrow as a thing as vapid as part of yesterday."
— George W. Rutler, from the Foreword