In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion
today dismantles distorted religious "histories" offered up by
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of
religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold
correction of the New Atheists's misrepresentations of the Christian
past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity
and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in
all of Western history.
Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we
may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great
dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan
society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that
what we term the "Age of Reason" was in fact the beginning of the
eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book
in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of
Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual
values.