Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture by Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Undaunted Hope in a Post-Christian World

We live in a post-Christian world. Contemporary thought--claiming to be "progressive" and "liberating"--attempts to place human beings in God's role as creator, lawgiver, and savior. But these post-Christian ways of thinking and living are running into dead ends and fatal contradictions.

This timely book demonstrates how the Christian worldview stands firm in a world dedicated to constructing its own knowledge, morality, and truth. Gene Edward Veith Jr. points out the problems with how today's culture views humanity, God, and even reality itself. He offers hope-filled, practical ways believers can live out their faith in a secularist society as a way to recover reality, rebuild culture, and revive faith.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction: After Postmodernism

Part 1: Reality

1. Constructing Our Own Worlds: The Ptolomaic Counterrevolution
2. Knowing Nature: The Dominance of Science
3. Mastering Nature: The Achievements of Science
4. Recovering Reality: The Story of Kant's Neighbor

Part 2: The Body

1. The End of Sex: The Exaltation of Barrenness
2. Repudiating the Body: Engineering Children and Oneself
3. Sexual Counterrevolution: Toward a Theology of the Body

Part 3: Society

1. Culture and Anticulture: Society without Community
2. Power Politics and the Death of Education: From Relativism to Absolutism
3. Rebuilding Civilization: Options for the Dark Ages

Part 4: Religion

1. Spiritual but Not Religious: The Religion of the Nones
2. Religious but Not Spiritual: The New Gods
3. Post-Christian Christianity: Desecularizing the Church

Conclusion: Toward the Postsecular
General Index
Scripture Index

"Post-Christian is a provocative overview of the challenges Christians at the whipping post face. As the sea of faith temporarily recedes, fewer people have the confidence to debate ideas, raise children, and build institutions. Gene Veith explains the problems of constructing our own worlds, exalting barrenness, and building society without community. Some leaders say we'll survive by secularizing the church, but this book shows a better way: pray and work for a new reformation."
--Marvin Olasky

"No one has taught me how to think like a Christian more than Gene Veith. Post-Christian just may be the magnum opus of a writer and thinker who has already contributed a body of work of immeasurable worth to the church. This book is a library in miniature for the Christian who wants to navigate the post-Christian world biblically, thoughtfully, and faithfully. It should be on the shelf in every Christian home."
--Karen Swallow Prior,  author, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

"Gene Veith's Post-Christian is a logical, cogent, sensible, no-spin, facts-based, unapologetic analysis of the zeitgeist in Western culture. Which is to say, it's not very politically correct. But that's a good thing! In this post-truth, reality-denying cultural moment, we need the grounded sanity this book provides. Highly informative and well-researched, Post-Christian is a treasure trove of wisdom and a valuable resource for the church's revitalization."
--Brett McCracken, Senior Editor, The Gospel Coalition; author, The Wisdom Pyramid

"In the barrage of books attempting to make sense of our particular cultural moment, few authors exhibit the range of thought and clarity of mind that is on display in Post-Christian. Gene Veith is a competent guide through the maze of exhausted ideas that characterize late modernity. Science, technology, sex, politics, religion--nothing has escaped the corrosive effects of the attempt to abandon Christianity. This is, however, not a book of despair but of hope. As Veith reminds us, the truths of the Christian faith continually reassert themselves, for they are rooted in reality itself."
--Mark T. Mitchell, Dean of Academic Affairs, Patrick Henry College

Gene Edward Veith (PhD, University of Kansas) is provost and professor of literature emeritus at Patrick Henry College. He previously worked as the culture editor of World magazine. Veith and his wife, Jackquelyn, have three grown children and seven grandchildren.

Crossway

Pub Date: January 28, 2020

0.9" H x 8.9" L x 6.0" W

320 Pages

Paperback