Viennese Faults
Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna
by Robert Weldon Whalen
Eerdmans, 2007
(339 pages, $25.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Peter J. Leithart
Part travelogue, part intellectual history, part art and music criticism, Sacred Spring argues that Viennese modernism, the source of so much of the intellectual history of the contemporary West, cannot be understood as a secular movement. Its writers and artists were not materialists, nor did they think the world consists only of what can be known by the senses.
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Peter J. Leithart is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and the president of Trinity House Institute for Biblical, Liturgical & Cultural Studies in Birmingham, Alabama. His many books include Defending Constantine (InterVarsity), Between Babel and Beast (Cascade), and, most recently, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Baylor University Press). His weblog can be found at www.leithart.com. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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