Re-Paganize the West!

September 6th, 2007 | 1 min read

Peter Leithart offers a typically instructive and provocative article at First Things today. If I understand it correctly, he claims that we need to understand the ways in which what we often call "modernism" is the same as primitive cultures. He writes:

Re-paganizing the West means acting on the premise that, for all our pretense of sophistication, the West has never entirely escaped the impulses and habits of primitive culture, or that, by escaping Christianity, we are reverting to it. Re-paganizing the West means working out the implications of the French sociologist Bruno Latour’s assertion: We have never been modern.

I hope it is a hypothesis that he expounds upon and defends in his forthcoming book (ht: Macht). The full essay is a must read.

Matthew Lee Anderson

Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.

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Re-Paganize the West!

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