The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad Gregory

MJ. Smith
MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 54,475
edited January 18 in Book Requests

Logos already carries https://www.logos.com/product/311079/rebel-in-the-ranks-martin-luther-the-reformation-and-the-conflicts-that-continue-to-shape-our-world

It needs to also carry https://www.amazon.com/Unintended-Reformation-Religious-Revolution-Secularized/dp/0674088050/ref%3Drvi_d_sccl_1/130-9362370-3536838

Amazon blurb:

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism―all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.

Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science―as the source of all truth―necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.

The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

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  • Jeremy Gunter
    Jeremy Gunter Member Posts: 112 ✭✭✭

    This is a fascinating topic I'd love to read more about.

    On an unrelated note, how do you get hyperlinks to stand out in their own box like you do?

  • MJ. Smith
    MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 54,475

    I paste the URL in (dropping everything after the question mark if it has any), hit the space bar once, hit enter

    Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."