The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
May 18, 2020
The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan JacobsMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Some months ago this book was reviewed in The Christian Century and I put it on my to-read list. Last week looking for some work-related books to order, I saw this on the list and thought "That might be relevant to our moment" so I ordered it and have already finished it.
The book focuses on five thinkers--Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, and Simone Weil--as they imagined what the future should be like after the Second World War. The key idea was that "miseducation had left the ordinary citizens of Western democracies in helpless thrall to the propagandistic machinations of unscrupulous nationalist movements," so they reimagined what education could/should do. A key theme was that they were critical of the technological fixes so fascinated upon by many in the West.
Jacobs is clear at the end that the changes these folks imagined did not occur. In many ways, it is a pessimistic book.
I did find some ideas that might be helpful to our current moment, and I did order one Auden book and one Eliot book that I haven't read. Also, there's one really excellent Bonhoeffer quote in the book.
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Part of the fun of being a well-read person is the intertextuality that emerges in our reading. As I was beginning this book I was finishing a collection of George Herbert poems and Herbert was referenced a handful of times in the book. Then, the final chapter of this book discusses Jacques Ellul. I had just started an Ellul book on Ecclesiastes, only the second time I've read Ellul, the first time being way back in 1997.
Posted by: Scott Jones | May 19, 2020 at 12:10 PM