Celebrated author Mary Eberstadt continues her ground-breaking examination of the legacy of the sexual revolution. The book's predecessor, Adam and Eve after the Pill (2012), dissected the revolution's microcosmic fallout via its empirical effects on the lives of men, women, and children. This follow-on book investigates the revolution's macrocosmic transformations in three spheres: society, politics, and Christianity. It also includes an analysis of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. With unflinching logic, Eberstadt summarizes the toll on Western society of today's fractured homes, feral children, and social isolates. Empathetic yet precise, she connects the dots between shrinking, broken families and rising sexual confusion, seen most recently in transgenderism and related phenomena. The book also traces the dissolution of the home to signature developments in Western politics, especially the increase in acrimony, polarization, street violence, and identity politics. The result is an indictment of the turn taken by much of the world following the post-1960s embrace of contraception and the stigmatization of traditional morality. The book's section on the revolution's infiltration of the churches is must-reading for anyone concerned about the fate of Western Christianity. In a moment when millions wonder whether the Catholic Church will retreat from age-old moral teachings, this book demands to be put at the center of discussion. Adam and Eve after the Pill, Revisited is both an indispensable blueprint for today's emerging revisionism, and a manifesto for a more humane order to come.

Secular and religious thinkers agree: the sexual revolution is one of the most important milestones in human history. Perhaps nothing has changed life for so many, so fast, as the severing of sex and procreation. But what has been the result? This ground-breaking book by noted essayist and author Mary Eberstadt contends that sexual freedom has paradoxically produced widespread discontent. Drawing on sociologists Pitirim Sorokin, Carle Zimmerman, and others; philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe and novelist Tom Wolfe; and a host of feminists, food writers, musicians, and other voices from across today's popular culture, Eberstadt makes her contrarian case with an impressive array of evidence. Her chapters range across academic disciplines and include supporting evidence from contemporary literature and music, women's studies, college memoirs, dietary guides, advertisements, television shows, and films. Adam and Eve after the Pill examines as no book has before the seismic social changes caused by the sexual revolution. In examining human behavior in the post-liberation world, Eberstadt provocatively asks: Is food the new sex? Is pornography the new tobacco? Adam and Eve after the Pill will change the way readers view the paradoxical impact of the sexual revolution on ideas, morals, and humanity itself.

In this magisterial work, leading cultural critic Mary Eberstadt delivers a powerful new theory about the decline of religion in the Western world. The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshalling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself. Drawing on sociology, history, demography, theology, literature, and many other sources, Eberstadt shows that family decline and religious decline have gone hand in hand in the Western world in a way that has not been understood before—that they are, as she puts it in a striking new image summarizing the book’s thesis, “the double helix of society, each dependent on the strength of the other for successful reproduction.” In sobering final chapters, Eberstadt then lays out the enormous ramifications of the mutual demise of family and faith in the West. While it is fashionable in some circles to applaud the decline both of religion and the nuclear family, there are, as Eberstadt reveals, enormous social, economic, civic, and other costs attendant on both declines. Her conclusion considers this tantalizing question: whether the economic and demographic crisis now roiling Europe and spreading to America will have the inadvertent result of reviving the family as the most viable alternative to the failed welfare state—fallout that could also lay the groundwork for a religious revival as well. How the West Really Lost God is both a startlingly original account of how secularization happens and a sweeping brief about why everyone should care. A book written for agnostics as well as believers, atheists as well as “none of the above,” it will permanently change the way every reader understands the two institutions that have hitherto undergirded Western civilization as we know it—family and faith—and the real nature of the relationship between those two pillars of history.

Who am I? The question today haunts every society in the Western world. Legions of people—especially the young—have become unmoored from a firm sense of self. To compensate, they join the ranks of ideological tribes spawned by identity politics and react with frenzy against any perceived threat to their group. As identitarians track and expose the ideologically impure, other citizens face the consequences of their rancor: a litany of “isms” run amok across all levels of cultural life, the free marketplace of ideas muted by agendas shouted through megaphones, and a spirit of general goodwill warped into a state of perpetual outrage. How did we get here? Why have we divided against one another so bitterly? In Primal Screams, acclaimed cultural critic Mary Eberstadt presents the most provocative and original theory to come along in recent years. The rise of identity politics, she argues, is a direct result of the fallout of the sexual revolution, especially the collapse and shrinkage of the family. As Eberstadt illustrates, humans have forged their identities within the kinship structure from time immemorial. The extended family, in a real sense, is the first tribe and teacher. But with its unprecedented decline across various measures, generations of people have been set adrift and can no longer answer the question Who am I? concerning primordial ties. Desperate for solidarity and connection, they claim membership in politicized groups whose displays of frantic irrationalism amount to primal screams for familial and communal loss. Written in her impeccable style and with empathy rarely encountered in today’s divisive discourse, Eberstadt’s theory holds immense explanatory power that no serious citizen can afford to ignore. The book concludes with three incisive essays by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel, each sharing their perspective on the author’s formidable argument.

The author reopens the politically incorrect question of just how much children need their parents, especially their mothers. She contends that absent parents--and children who feel like just another chore to be outsourced--are the common denominator of recent epidemics among young people, including obesity, STDs, behavioral problems such as attention deficit disorder, and the use of psychiatric medication in even very young children; and asks whether this trend has already reached a tipping point in American society.

Mary Eberstadt, “one of the most acute and creative social observers of our time,” (Francis Fukuyama) shines a much-needed spotlight on a disturbing trend in American society: discrimination against traditional religious belief and believers, who are being aggressively pushed out of public life by the concerted efforts of militant secularists. In It’s Dangerous to Believe, Mary Eberstadt documents how people of faith—especially Christians who adhere to traditional religious beliefs—face widespread discrimination in today’s increasingly secular society. Eberstadt details how recent laws, court decisions, and intimidation on campuses and elsewhere threaten believers who fear losing their jobs, their communities, and their basic freedoms solely because of their convictions. They fear that their religious universities and colleges will capitulate to aggressive secularist demands. They fear that they and their families will be ostracized or will have to lose their religion because of mounting social and financial penalties for believing. They fear they won’t be able to maintain charitable operations that help the sick and feed the hungry. Is this what we want for our country? Religious freedom is a fundamental right, enshrined in the First Amendment. With It’s Dangerous to Believe Eberstadt calls attention to this growing bigotry and seeks to open the minds of secular liberals whose otherwise good intentions are transforming them into modern inquisitors. Not until these progressives live up to their own standards of tolerance and diversity, she reminds us, can we build the inclusive society America was meant to be.

In Sex and the Catholic Feminist, Browder challenges the notion that you can't be a feminist and believe in God. She echoes John Paul II's call for Catholics to embody a "new feminism," a radical new view of women's dignity. Her goal in this book is to "follow one golden thread of feminism in America—the pro-life thread—to show why it has been ignored by the media and left out of public conversation for fifty years." For Browder, the pro-life movement is about more than abortion and contraception; it's about loving and respecting all human life. While tracing the history of feminism in America, Browder discovered at the core of these various feminist movements a search for personhood. Where do women place their identity and find their fulfillment? Browder ultimately concludes that in our noisy, consumerist society, placing one's identity anywhere other than in God will prove disappointing and unfulfilling. "My hope is that some thoughts presented here will spark a new conversation and help heal one of the deepest political divisions in our nation." — Sue Ellen Browder