In this brilliant and tightly reasoned volume, well-known author Lesslie Newbigin analyzes the sources of truth and authority in the modern world. He acknowledges that modern society treats all claims to authority with suspicion. With what authority, then, can and does the Christian church present the gospel to modern society? Bible, tradition, reason, and experience are all used in answering this question, and this book seeks to examine their proper use and their relations to each other.

This vigorous and incisive critique of modernity lights the path to recovering the revitalizing heritage of classical Christianity.

The distinctive social and cultural developments of recent years are so familiar to us as to become invisible. So write the editors in the introduction. Although no missionaries worth their salt would try to evangelize without first studying the cultural and spiritual background of their hearers, the church in the late twentieth century often does not begin to understand modern and postmodern thinking. At the second conference of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization in Manila, 1989, Dr. Os Guinness gave a paper on Faith and Modernity, which provoked great interest. As part of the response to his paper a conference was held in Uppsala, Sweden in 1993, at which an international group of experts probed more deeply into the questions of modernity and post modernity. Participants represented the United States, Canada, India, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. They included such well-known experts as Os Guinness, James Hunter, Lesslie Newbigin, Vinay Samuel, Elaine Storkey, and David Wells. Each of them has contributed to this volume, covering such topics as: What is Modernity? Truth and Authority in Modernity Information Technology and Christian Faith New Age Modernity and Spirituality Modernity and Morality This collection of papers is offered as a resource and a challenge to the church for its mission in the context of the modern world.

Modernism and Authority presents a provocative new take on the early paintings of Pablo Picasso and the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire. Charles Palermo argues that references to theology and traditional Christian iconography in the works of Picasso and Apollinaire are not mere symbolic gestures; rather, they are complex responses to the symbolist art and poetry of figures important to them, including Paul Gauguin, Charles Morice, and Santiago Rusi–ol. The young Picasso and his contemporaries experienced the challenges of modernity as an attempt to reflect on the lost relation to authority. For the symbolists, art held authority by revealing something compellingÑsomething to which audiences must respond lest they lose claim to their own moral authority. Instead of the total transformation of the reader or viewer that symbolist creators envision, Picasso and Apollinaire imagine a divided self, responding only partially or ambivalently to the work of artÕs call. Navigating these problems of symbolist art and poetry entails considering the nature of the work of art and of oneÕs response to it, the modern subjectÕs place in history, and the relevance of historical truth to our methodological choices in the present.

This book offers an intellectual and spiritual biography of Lesslie Newbigin, a figure of patristic proportions in the twentieth-century history of the Church. Drawing on thirty-five years of personal and literary acquaintance with his subject and on a thorough examination of the Newbigin archives, Geoffrey Wainwright crafts a rich and varied portrait of this outstanding witness to the Gospel.

For much of our century, pragmatism has enjoyed a charmed life, holding the dominant point of view in American politics, law, education, and social thought in general. After suffering a brief eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has enjoyed a revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this sweeping critique of pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually fulfilled its promise. In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals felt themselves in the grips of a spiritual crisis. This confrontation with the "acids of modernity" eroded older faiths and led to a sense that life would continue in the awareness, of absences: knowledge without truth, power without authority, society without spirit, self without identity, politics without virtue, existence without purpose, history without meaning. In Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber faced a world in which God was "dead" and society was succumbing to structures of power and domination. In America, Henry Adams resigned from Harvard when he realized there were no truths to be taught and when he could only conclude: "Experience ceases to educate." To the American philosophers of pragmatism, it was experience that provided the basis on which new methods of knowing could replace older ideas of truth. Diggins examines how, in different ways, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., demonstrated that modernism posed no obstacle in fields such as science, education, religion, law, politics, and diplomacy. Diggins also examines the work of the neopragmatists Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty and their attempt to resolve the crisis of postmodernism. Using one author to interrogate another, Diggins brilliantly allows the ideas to speak to our conditions as well as theirs. Did the older philosophers succeed in fulfilling the promises of pragmatism? Can the neopragmatists write their way out of what they have thought themselves into? And does America need philosophers to tell us that we do not need foundational truths when the Founders already told us that the Constitution would be a "machine" that would depend more upon the "counterpoise" of power than on the claims of knowledge? Diggins addresses these and other essential questions in this magisterial account of twentieth-century intellectual life. It should be read by everyone concerned about the roots of postmodernism (and its links to pragmatism) and about the forms of thought and action available for confronting a world after postmodernism.

The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives. Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence. Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world.