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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A comprehensive guide to a neglected master, November 23, 2007
This review is from: Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (Hardcover)
As in his earlier J. R. R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth, Bradley Birzer provides an excellent overview of a major intellectual figure from the twentieth-century Catholic literary revival. Dawson is lesser-known than figures such as Tolkien, but was lauded in his day by the likes of T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee, and Russell Kirk. For Dawson, a convert to Roman Catholicism, religion was the key of history and the basis of culture, and with that core principle in mind, he sought to analyze both the course of world history and the underlying currents of his own age. His scholarship was capacious, as he wrote studies in periods from pre-history to the modern age. He was also one of his era's most incisive social critics, especially in his early and consistent analysis of, and opposition to, totalitarianism. His historical works were regarded as incisive and innovative in their day, and his cultural criticism anticipated the work of contemporary thinkers like Michael Bureligh in seeing modern ideologies as "political religions."
Bradley Birzer traces the contours of Dawson's intellectual biography more fully than any previous scholar. Rooted in dispostive research and written with deep sensitivity to the centrality of Dawson's faith to his scholarship, Birzer provides both an outstanding introduction to Dawson's thought and much material for seasoned Dawson scholars to ponder. Sanctifying the World is a fine contribution to the ongoing revival of interest in Dawson's thought and in the Catholic literary revival generally.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Artist's Advocate, March 27, 2008
This review is from: Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (Hardcover)
Forgotten by some and unknown to others, Christopher Dawson's extraordinary mind comes to life in Birzer's thorough and insightful book. Dawson was a writer and thinker for writers and thinkers and (somewhat unexpectedly) also for artists. In an age of propaganda, Dawson proclaimed the truths that the ideologues chose to ignore, suppress and in many cases destroy.
Keenly aware of the horrors of totalitarian government, yet also aware of the dangers of "totalitarian" free-markets, Dawson recognized the reality that humanity thrives not as a manipulatable mass or a disinterested collection of free agents, but as a culture. In Europe this culture had Christian roots that grew out of the ashes of the Roman empire. That culture developed over the course of centuries. Dawson realized that though it took many generations to mature, culture could only be sustained by a people willing to live up to it's ideals and truths. And it could be destroyed in an instant by those seeking only the "new" and who somehow considered its past as of little consequence.
Dawson took up the challenge of trying to sustain and nurture Christian culture at one of its darkest hours. Like Chesterton, Dawson's insight and understanding is pertinent now more than ever. His influence can clearly be seen in the works of Eliot but more recently in the works of Pope John Paul II. For artists in particular, Dawson reminds that the power of poetry, paint and music does not aimlessly spew from the fountain of individual whim, but blossoms from the rich soil of works, and indeed the very lives, of those whose world we inherit.
Bradley Birzer has done a great service by resurrecting the story and the ideas of Christopher Dawson. Highly recommended to historians, theologians, philosophers and artists alike.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An authoritative assessment of Dawson's scholarship, February 4, 2008
This review is from: Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (Hardcover)
Bradley Birzer's Sanctifying the World provides an authoritative and comprehensive appreciation of Christopher Dawson's achievement. Meticulous researched, painstakingly documented, and gracefully written, Birzer's assessment of Dawson's life and work deserves a wide readership. The book's thorough bibliography alone makes an invaluable contribution to any serious effort to grasp Dawson's place in historical scholarship in the twentieth century. Historians seeking to understand the contours of Christian thought in the ideological wasteland of the twentieth century owe a debt of gratitude to Birzer for his labors. Scholars in particular concerned with the ongoing debate over the historical and normative relationship between Christianity and culture cannot afford to ignore this volume.
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