Dynamics of World History

Rating:
Summary: A 'must read' for anyone interested in Catholic history.
Review: This book is awesome! Dawson was a professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University, but don't let that scare you away thinking it will be hard to read. It is written in language that us lay people can understand and relate to in a very deep and meaningful way. Dawson is Catholic and the book will give you an incredible historical perspective through Catholicism, however it really addresses all world religions and their role in human history and culture. Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of society's historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized (Americanized) Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West. Dawson maintains that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. This book shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible. If you're an active, faith loving, curious, sacramental Catholic this book will bring you to a whole new level of knowledge about your religion. This is one of those, `changed my life', kind of books in the best kind of way.

Rating:
Summary: Unfashionable Truth
Review: This hefty volume (I am reviewing the 2002 paperback edition) is the best book on history I have read. I have to qualify this. I have read very good books about particular eras, wars and civilizations. This is a much more ambitious work: it is a vast work on the philosophy of history, one that is at the same time all-embracing and full of insights into particular events and personalities.

It is also a terribly unfashionable book: I am amazed that much of it was written within my lifetime. It is a testimonial to a bygone era, when diversity still included people of faith and, apparently, even real Catholics. It is almost unthinkable that this work was produced by somebody that was a Harvard professor until 1962!

Who should read this book? I guess the obvious audience is Catholics who have an interest in the true history of Western Civilization and of how it was created by the Church. Don't expect a quick and simple historical sketch a la Belloc (whom I do love!) This book, while not difficult and clearly written, is both very wide-ranging and very deep.

But this book should also be read by anybody with an interest in the philosophy of history. For a non-Catholic, especially somebody multiculturally educated, this will be a very challenging read: all of your assumptions and prejudices will be challenged. If you will persevere in reading, you will get a point-of-view so totally inconsistent with the prevailing views that you will question the author's sanity. But then, maybe, you will start doubting the sanity, not of the author, but of our civilization, a civilization that has lost its center: the Faith from which it arose.