The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

I have no personal connection to Yale or Donald Kagan, but I enjoyed listening to some of his lectures on Ancient Greece that are free online, as I previously noted in my first blog post, and I approvingly cited his take on Niall Ferguson’s book Civilization: The West and the Rest , here .  He was a stout defender of the West in academia, and I’m sure he will be missed. He passed away  Aug 6, the age of 89.  Hat tip Tyler Cowen .

This is a review of the 2020 book History: Forgotten and Remembered by Andrew Zwerneman. In my process of trying to understand what is going on in the world I've written a time or two on the postmodernist / Critical Theory re-framing the study of history to open the door for an anti-Christian and anti-Western worldview. History: Forgotten and Remembered is the positive antidote to the negative I have hitherto dwelt on. Though Zwerneman clearly recognizes the problems - referring to history as "increasingly under siege," and recognizing "this assault" as "a symptom of the declining study of the humanities," the book stays optimistic and provides teachers (and, I'll add, learners like myself) a positive framework of how history should be taught and experienced, and a reminder that the postmodern way is not the only way.  Note: "Postmodern" and "Critical Theory" are my words; I don't think Zwerneman ever references either.

Historical narratives and comparative civilizations analysis had been dead for decades after the history coup of the 1960s. In my reading of events, this was to cover up the obvious benefits of Christianity and capitalism that were highlighted by influential pre-coup historians like Arnold Toynbee and Carol Quigley. Fortunately, in recent years the “civilization” is starting to return to popular discourse. The postmodernist moratorium on analytical history is beginning to crack. A 2014 article is titled “The Return of Civilization - and of Arnold Toynbee?” I take the question mark to indicate that they are sure the concept of civilization is making a comeback, but Toynbee’s comeback (and that of Christianity in historical analysis) is more speculative. That is my reading of the present moment as well. In this millennium or close to it, several popular books with civilizational themes have been published and have been well-received. Examples include: Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), by

We are all born with a tremendous curiosity, and a need to explore and understand the world around us - to understand how and why things work, and how we fit into it.  It is so fun to watch babies and toddlers and young children go through this process.  I suspect that my sense of curiosity was partially stunted through 16 years of formal education.  But when I was in graduate school (Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Madison) around 2008 I started to follow politics, having a vague sense that something different was happening and things were changing in the word. I felt my curiosity drive began to resurface, and I opened a new chapter in my intellectual life.  (Maybe it had something to do with developing and practicing critical thinking techniques in a new way as a graduate student.)  Politics then gave way to the main question that planted itself in my mind, which was "How did the world come to be the way it is now, from how it used to be?"  We