Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage

"Why do they hate us so much?" Many in the U.S. are baffled at the hatred and anti-Western sentiment they see on the international news. Why are people around the world so resentful of Western cultural values and ideals? Historian Meic Pearse unpacks the deep divides between the West and the rest of the world. He shows how many of the underlying assumptions of Western civilization directly oppose and contradict the cultural and religious values of significant people groups. Those in the Third World, Pearse says, "have the sensation that everything they hold dear and sacred is being rolled over by an economic and cultural juggernaut that doesn?t even know it?s doing it . . . and wouldn?t understand why what it?s destroying is important or of value." Pearse's keen analysis offers insight into perspectives not often understood in the West, and provides a starting point for intercultural dialogue and rapprochement.

Meic Pearse, originally from Britain, now lives in Croatia and the United States, where he is professor of history at Houghton College in Houghton, New York. He studied history and English at Swansea, University of Wales, and management studies at the Polytechnic of Wales. He took his M.Phil. and D.Phil. in ecclesiastical history at Oxford University. For more than a decade, he was involved as part of a team establishing a new church in Swansea. He has also made pipe valves in a German factory, served as a tax collector in local government, taught business studies at a Jewish school, taught history and economics in a Quaker institution, and lectured in church history in Britain and the Balkans. Books he has written include Between Known Men and Visible Saints, The Great Restoration, Who's Feeding Whom? and We Must Stop Meeting Like This. He has articles published in Church History, Anabaptism Today, Third Way and other periodicals.