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After 19 years, volume 3 in the monumental Christianity & Western Thought series is now available. The first volume in this series by renowned and dynamic scholar Colin Brown (also editor of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology), was widely received as an excellent textbook in philosophical and theological history. The second volume, by Alan Padgett and Steve Wilkens covered the revolutionary 19th century, and the latest volume, and the final in the series, covers the 20th century. On the hinges of the 19th Century's optimistic age of Enlightenment, the 20th Century, so argue Padgett and Wilkens, was a period of disillusionment. Humankind slowly and crushingly lost faith in reason, science, the human self, and in society. Two world wars, the advent of nuclear arms, and unprecedented human suffering destroyed belief in human ability to make the world better, and in any notion of metaphysical transcendence. Quite naturally this gave way to questions of meaning, reality, and identity eventually leading philosophers and theologians into an enigmatic, and seemingly directionless, postmodernism. Padgett & Wilkens address these developments in philosophy from a conservative Christian point of view offering summary descriptions, insightful analysis and critique. In this volume, the focus is mainly on philosophy, although major Christian theologians are also covered. Chapter topics include, Analytic Philosophy, German & French Existentialism, Dialectical Theology, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, and the beginnings of Postmodernity. An excellent resource for professors of philosophy who want to orient their students to philosophy, this book is also accessible to anyone who wants to understand their faith against the broader intellectual currents of the West, and in particular the 20th Century.
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