Foreword by Christina Scott and Introduction by Mary Douglas
Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas. It has been described as a brilliant work of synthesis, for in this single volume he outlined his main thesis for the history of culture, which was his life's work. Anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion, and history formed the backdrop for the key idea of his thought―namely, that religion is the soul of a culture and that a society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture. To Dawson, a return to the Christian culture that had formed Western civilization was the only remedy for a world adrift.
Dawson was writing in a period between the two great wars of the twentieth century, a time when some thought that the idea of progress had finally been discredited by the carnage and barbarism of the First World War. Progress and Religion was clearly intended to challenge the doctrine of progress, the rather naïve but persistent belief that 'in every day and in every way the world grows better and better.'
Dawson argued that Western civilization was at a turning point and confronted with two real choices: reappropriate a vital Christian culture or move increasingly toward more dangerous and alienated expressions of consumerism and totalitarianism. In Progress and Religion, he contends that no culture could truly thrive if cut off from its religious roots.
PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL EDITION:
"Progress and Religion is undoubtedly a brilliant book. Its argument is closely reasoned, admirably presented, lucidly expressed. Its standpoint is original and suggestive, profound and illuminating. Without exaggeration, it may be regarded as one of the books of our generation."―The Manchester Guardian, 1929
"A book of vast learning . . . a theme which invites the consideration of a stately procession of the greatest names in the history of the world's thought."―The Scotsman, 1929
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Book Description Condition: NEW. 2001. Originally published 1927. Trade paperback. 198pp. Index. NEW. Seller Inventory # 2657474
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Book Description Paper Back. Condition: New. ''Progress,'' claims Christopher Dawson, ''has been, in fact, the working faith of our civilization, and so completely has it become a part of the modern mind that any attempt to criticize it has seemed almost an act of impiety.'' Progress and Religion is a direct attack on the idea of progress as secularization - the theory that a civilization develops in direct proportion to the decline of religious belief and influence. Dawson argues that the doctrine of progress (a belief that ''every day and in every way the world grows better and better'') was developed not by anthropologists and historians whose work it is to track the process of human development but by political theorists and revolutionaries whose attention is focused on the immediate future. Dawson distrusts this ''abrupt passage from corruption to perfection, from darkness to light,'' positing that it is too sudden to be progressive and cannot sustain human culture apart from religious tradition. Culture is, as he puts it, ''essentially a spiritual community.it finds its appropriate organ not in a state, but in a Church, that is to say a society which is the embodiment of a purely spiritual tradition and which rests, not on material power, but on the free adhesion of the individual mind.'' 198 pp. Seller Inventory # 58761
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