Atheist delusions : the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies / David Bentley Hart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hart, David Bentley.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Church history--Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600.

Church history.

Civilization, Western.

Christianity--Influence.

Christianity.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (272 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious "histories" offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists's misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the "Age of Reason" was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values.

Contents:

Introduction

Faith, reason, and freedom : a view from the present

The gospel of unbelief

The age of freedom

The mythology of the secular age : modernity's rewriting of the Christian past

Faith and reason

The night of reason

The destruction of the past

The death and rebirth of science

Intolerance and persecution

Intolerance and war

An age of darkness

Revolution : the Christian invention of the human

The great rebellion

A glorious sadness

A liberating message

The face of the faceless

The death and birth of worlds

Divine humanity

Reaction and retreat : modernity and the eclipse of the human

Secularism and its victims

Sorcerers and saints.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-249) and index.

ISBN:

9786612352669

9781282352667

1282352660

9780300155648

0300155646

OCLC:

593321351