- Price:
- $16.95
- ISBN 13:
- 978-1-59947-466-3
- Size:
- 6 x 9
- Page Count:
- 272
- Date Published:
- April 1, 2013
- Price:
- $11.99
- ISBN 13:
- 978-1-59947-429-8
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Back to TabsMary Eberstadt is one of the most acute and creative social observers of our time. —Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man
A brilliant contribution to the really big question about the future of the West and a pleasure to read. —Rodney Stark, author of The Rise of Christianity
Clear as a bell, beautifully plotted, and the point it makes overturns conventional wisdom and strikes far deeper into reality than any rival argument in the field. —Michael Novak, author of The Myth of Romantic Love, No One Sees God, and Belief and Unbelief
A provocative and powerful portrait of the familial roots of contemporary secularization in the West. —W. Bradford Wilcox, director of National Marriage Project, University of Virginia
Finely written impressively argued, and entirely persuasive. This book tells us much about the condition of Western societies today and reminds us that the atheists and the Nietzscheans owe their influence less to the truth of their views than to the loneliness to which they appeal. —Roger Scruton, author of The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat
No theorist of secularization has come close to Eberstadt in sociological insight or explanatory power. —Mary Ann Glendon, author of The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt
An absolutely brilliant and strikingly fresh portrait of the ‘double-helix’ of faith and family, coupled with a potentially game-changing analysis of the why and how of secularization, all written with the sparkle and empathy that characterize the work of one of America’s premier social analysts. —George Weigel, author of Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II
Introduction / 3
Chapter 1: Does Secularization Even Exist? / 25
Chapter 2: What Is the Conventional Story Line about How the West Lost God? What Are the Problems with It? / 59
Chapter 3: Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part One: The Empirical Links among Marriage, Childbearing, and Religiosity / 89
Chapter 4: Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part Two: Snapshots of the Demographic Record; Or How Fundamental Changes in Family Formation Have Accompanied the Decline of Christianity in the West / 105
Chapter 5: Circumstantial Evidence for the “Family Factor,” Part Three: Because the “Family Factor” Explains Problems That Existing Theories of Secularization Do Not Explain— Including What Is Known as “American Exceptionalism” / 125
Chapter 6: Assisted Religious Suicide: How Some Churches Participated in Their Own Downfall by Ignoring the Family Factor / 139
Chapter 7: Putting All the Pieces Together: Toward an Alternative Anthropology of Christian Belief / 155
Chapter 8: The Future of Faith and Family: The Case for Pessimism / 169
Chapter 9: The Future of Christianity and the Family: The Case for Optimism / 179
Conclusion: Why Does Any of This Matter? / 193
Epilogue: A Reflection on What Nietzsche and His Intellectual Heirs Missed, and Why They Might Have Missed It / 211
Acknowledgments / 217
Notes / 219
Index / 247
Back to TabsCatholic Herald
09/29/2014
“This thoughtful, carefully argued book should be read by anyone interested in the future of the family—and thus the future of the Christian faith.” —Francis Phillips
“Every Christian leader—particularly pastors—in Europe and America needs to read this book.” —Phil Cooke. Christian News Journal
“Breakdown of the family. It has long been recognized that experience with an earthly father deeply informs the perspective about the heavenly father. In How the West Really Lost God, sociologist Mary Eberstadt correctly asserts, ‘The fortunes of religion rise or fall with the state of the family.’” —Libby Anne, Love, Joy, feminism blog
“Her short, elegantly written book repeatedly shows that strong families help to keep religious practice alive and that too many people see a causal connection running exclusively in the opposite direction.”—The Economist
“A short column cannot do justice to the wide and deep reading and all the evidence Eberstadt has marshaled for her argument, so you are urged to read this book. What is certain is that this is one of those books that will forever change the conversation about why Christianity is in decline in the West.” —Crisis Magazine
“In her deeply insightful new book, How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt suggests that there is a more fundamental cause underlying the cultural loss of religion—a cause that all the previous research has mistaken for just another effect. What if the decline of religion is integrally connected to, and perhaps even a result of, the decline of the natural family?” —Washington Times