Indeterminate Historian
At the End of an Age
by John Lukacs
New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002
(230 pages; $22.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Jay W. Richards
As a historian1 John Lukacs is in his God-given domain, blessed with that most desirable of traits: He notices crucial details that lesser historians either ignore or wander blindly past. He is expert at drawing out the risky details of history, at reminding us—or teaching us—that events now comfortably settled in the fixed past were once teetering contingencies. Much of what has happened didn’t have to happen. History, unlike much of natural science, is the domain of the unrepeatable and unpredictable.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Jay W. Richards is vice president and senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Untamed God (InterVarsity, 2003) and co-author with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Regnery, 2004).
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
27.2—March/April 2014
Higher Education Should Advance the Glorious Liberty of the Sons of God by Anthony Esolen
33.3—May/June 2020
on the Wisdom of the Good Doctor Edmund Pellegrino by Allen H. Roberts II
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
