Contact: Lauren Powers, Publicity Director, Encounter Books, 212-871-5741, lpowers@encounterbooks.com
MEDIA ADVISORY, Aug. 25 /Christian Newswire/ -- “The God That Did Not Fail -- How Religion Built and Sustains the West,” by Robert Royal
“The project of remaking the world without God--the Enlightenment--has failed. A powerful intellectual movement has arisen, a self-confident movement of believing Jews and Christians, to do better what the Enlightened proved incapable of doing. Robert Royal is wondrously informative on the intellectual bases of this new religious criticism, and is himself one of its leaders.” --Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute
"[Royal] does present a well-articulated synthesis of mostly secondhand sources that address the major historical developments in Western civilization…His writing is accessible and aimed a a general audience." --Pius Charles Murray of Library Journal
“The unsecularization of the world is the most important sociological fact about the twenty-first century and the third millennium. Robert Royal’s exploration of the interaction of biblical faith and culture will help readers of all religious persuasions and none wrestle with the implications of this momentous reality thoughtfully.” --George Weigel, Ethics and Public Policy Center
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Secular humanists and other “progressives” have been predicting the demise of religion for the past 250 years. But they keep running into a problem: those who were supposed to be liberated by the secular gospel that God is Dead aren’t buying it. Except for some parts of western Europe and in countries culturally destroyed by Communism, secularization in the radical sense has not occurred.
While it has not obliterated the religious impulse, however, the drive towards “progressive irreligion” has, Robert Royal believes, encouraged ignorance of religion’s central role in the development of the West. In The God That Did Not Fail, Royal offers an original reading of religion in ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity and Judaism, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, the several modern Enlightenments, culminating with a profound assessment of our current postmodern moment. He concludes that since religion is a permanent part of human nature and of the particular character of the West, our efforts should be directed not into a quixotic effort to deny the undeniable, especially as we face challenges from Islamic fundamentalism, but into promoting a well thought out and dynamic interplay of faith, reason, and modern freedoms.
Robert Royal is president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. Among his books are 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History and The Virgin and the Dynamo: The Use and Abuse of Religion in Environmental Debates.
