Later this month, Gateway Editions will be releasing Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, the new book by Acton research director Samuel Gregg. John Zmirak, senior editor at The Stream, has an early review of what he calls “a user’s guide to western civilization“:
Read. This. Book. Even if you must do so by artificial light, or on Kindle, in a noisy coffee shop that won’t allow hunting dogs.
Gregg’s book is the closest thing I’ve encountered in a long time to a one-volume user’s manual for operating Western Civilization. The only other candidate I can think of is the much longer and more difficult Christianity and Classical Culture. But that demands many more slow afternoons.
I wish every high school senior in America could be coaxed into reading Gregg’s book. It would serve to vaccinate them against the lazy, seductive falsehoods that await them in almost every college classroom. At virtually every college.
Gregg is learned in economics, history, philosophy and theology. A holistic thinker, he’s able to shine the sweet light of reason, gently colored by faith as if through a stained glass window, on many dank corners of modern confusion. His thesis throughout is that contemporary secularism has sawed off the tree limb it sits on.
