Customer Reviews

Faith in the Age of Reason: The Enlightenment from Galileo to Kant (IVP Histories)

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They say that we're still living in both the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Romanticism; our understanding of the material world is largely rational, while our view of religion and values is largely emotional (and do note that things were not always thus; see Nancy Pearcey's book Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning for more details.) This book chronicles the rise of the former in a very approachable way. Obviously the reading level is high - at about the college level - but I think it would be accessible to high school students as well. Highly recommended.

This book was required reading for my class on "Christianity and the Enlightenment" at seminary, and although I found it to be informative, I also found that I forgot much of the material soon after I read it. I'm not sure what to attribute this fact to, but I'm guessing that it has something to do either with the author's style or just to the fact that this was a short book on a broad topic. I doubt that the latter is the cause, however, since I usually enjoy overview books of this sort. Aside from the fact that I immediately forgot a large amount of the material, however, Hill manages to give a good account of Enlightenment ideas and history, if you can handle the machinegun speed at which he introduces new people, ideas, and movements.