In January 1944 the English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson posed what he called “the basic sociological problem of our time,” the relation of religion and mass culture.³ Writing in the midst of World War II, Dawson saw the choice facing the West as between spiritual renewal, on the one hand, and technocracy and totalitarianism, on the other: “Unless we find a way to restore the contact between the life of society and the life of the spirit our civilization will be destroyed by the forces which it has had the knowledge to create but not wisdom to control.”⁴ Dawson was...

Three premises of this book’s analysis need explicit articulation and defense: 1) the claim that there is a natural fit between a religious and a communal existence, that is, the claim for the superiority of a “communitarian” over an “individualistic” form of life for nurturing the religious individual; 2) the claim that, despite increasing attacks on ideas of progress during the past century and the demonstration of the inadequacy of such ideas for understanding history and politics, they largely continue, to our detriment, to shape our lives; and 3) the claim that politics must be founded on a non-or anti-utopian...

Common attribution has André Malraux (1901–76) declaring that the twenty-first century either “will be religious or it will not be at all.”² Undoubtedly this declaration should be placed with the pronouncements of other great naysayers, the Nietzsches, Kierkegaards, Corteses, and Solzhenitsyns, whom, having said something profound but partial, the age in many ways passes by.³ Because, as all great spiritual protests, the message of each of these writers is a corrective to its age, an attempt to temper the onesidedness of some particular worldview; removed from the context of its original appearance, it may seem, or be, one-sided itself.⁴...

Add to the artists and thinkers considered in the last chapter such composers as Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, and John Tavener, and we see that we already have in the arts, above all music, a kind of fuga mundi nostri, a flight from the world as we have received it, but also a way of opening that world to realities long neglected.² This can be viewed either as the inbreaking into our world of these long-neglected realities or, as in the case of Pärt’s tintinnabuli style (from the Latin for “bells”) the beginning of a new middle ages beyond modernism.³...

All religions make cosmological claims, claims about the structure, nature, and purposes of the cosmos, but, like Judaism before it, Christianity from the beginning was of its essence cosmological, seeing human life both as dramatic, centered on a struggle to achieve a proper use of freedom, and as eschatological, receiving its orientation from beyond history. All was viewed against a cosmic background articulated in Scripture and preserved in the liturgy. The previous chapter described the abundant variety of expressions of transcendence, both the transcendence of the philosophers and that of the theologians, found in ancient Christianity and to the eve...

The previous two chapters traced the history of the practice and expression of a sense of transcendence, and the diminishment of an orientation to transcendence in recent centuries. Earlier, the third chapter gave some idea of the role of the arts in both fostering and diminishing the place of transcendence in life. This final chapter considers thinkers and movements outside the arts who have rebelled against the diminishment of transcendence and have proposed various alternatives as to how the transcendent dimension of life might be expressed today.

In 1893 Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) published L’Action, with its central idea that...