How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt

How the West Really Lost God by Mary Eberstadt

In this magisterial work, leading cultural critic Mary Eberstadt delivers an influential new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshaling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows the reverse is also true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself. Drawing on sociology, history, demography, theology, literature, and many other sources, Eberstadt shows that family decline and religious decline have gone hand in hand in the Western world in a way that has not been understood before--that they are, as she puts it in a striking new image summarizing the book's thesis, the double helix of society, each dependent on the strength of the other for successful reproduction. In sobering final chapters, Eberstadt then lays out the enormous ramifications of the mutual demise of family and faith in the West. While it is fashionable in some circles to applaud the decline of both religion and the nuclear family, there are, as Eberstadt reveals, enormous social, economic, civic, and other costs attendant on both declines. Her conclusion considers this compelling question: whether the economic and demographic crisis now roiling Europe and spreading to America will have the unintentional result of reviving the family as the most viable alternative to the failed welfare state--fallout that could also lay the groundwork for a religious revival as well. How the West Really Lost God is a startlingly original account of how secularization happens and a sweeping brief about why everyone should care. A book written for agnostics as well as believers, atheists as well as none of the above, it will permanently change the way every reader understands the two institutions that have hitherto undergirded Western civilization as we know it--family and faith--and the fundamental nature of the relationship between those two pillars of history.

Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes, edited by Mary Eberstadt, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Contributing Editor to Policy Review, and the author of Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes. She was the previous managing editor of the Public Interest and the National Interest's executive editor.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781599473796
ISBN 10	1599473798
Title	How the West Really Lost God
Author	Mary Eberstadt
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Templeton Foundation Press,U.S.
Year published	2013-04-24
Number of pages	268
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.