Review
Fallen Family
How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization by Mary Eberstadt
Templeton Press, 2013
(268 pages, $19.37, hardcover)
reviewed by C. R. Wiley
We can hope that Western civilization is in the early stages of awakening from a bad dream. Mary Eberstadt's new book may help with that. It is more a stirring nudge than a blaring alarm—in part because it is an accessible work of social science, not a moral treatise. Throughout, she reassures us that she is just looking for the truth—the truth being amoral and merely factual in this case. Apart from my own doubts about the possibility or desirability of knowing facts as such, anyone who favors life over death, or meaning over the void, cannot help but feel a moral stirring.
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C. R. Wiley is a member of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters and has written for numerous periodicals. He is the author of The Household and the War for the Cosmos (Canon Press, 2019) and Man of the House (Wipf and Stock, 2017), as well as short fiction and the first book in a young-adult fantasy series, The Purloined Boy, which was republished by Canon Press in 2017.
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more on family from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
Errands into the Moral Wilderness
Forms of Christian Family Witness & Renewal by Allan C. Carlson
23.1—January/February 2010
It’s Bent on Bringing Down the House on the Family & the Church by Douglas Farrow
31.1—January/February 2018
The Wisdom of the Victorian Quest for Innocence by David Sandifer
more from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
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