New book

Today I received The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs (one of my favorite thinkers). Jacobs, a prolific writer on the Web (see, e.g., Snakes & Ladders, microblog, Text Patterns, etc.) seems to manage to produce a physical book every year or two (sometimes on fairly esoteric topics) as well as fulfilling his University teaching duties.

This one looks at five Christian thinkers who, separately and in deeply personal ways, considered what the war meant and would mean for Christianity and the West:

The war raised for each of the thinkers . . . a pressing set of questions about the relationship between Christianity and the Western democratic social order, and especially about whether Christianity was uniquely suited to the moral underpinning of that order. These questions led in turn to others: How might an increasingly secularized and religiously indifferent populace be educated and formed in Christian beliefs and practices? And what role might people like them—poets, novelists, philosophers, thinkers, but not professional theologians or pastors—play in the education of their fellow citizens of the West?

p. xvii.

The five are Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Auden, and Simone Weil. I am in the throes of anticipation and will report back when I have finished it.