Read more
Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is the first English translation of Pierre Manent's penetrating engagement with the seventeenth century polymath and apologist for the Christian faith, Blaise Pascal. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was the first Christian apologist to address modern human beings on their own terms and present a defense of the Christian religion that still resonates today. A major publishing and intellectual event in France when it first appeared in 2022, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is Pierre Manent's investigation of Pascal's exploration of Christianity in the wake of a sharp atheistic turn at the dawn of the modern state and modern science. Comprehensive in scope and profound in treatment, this engagement with all of Pascal's writings, including his famous Pensées, appeals to the reader's head and heart. Manent emphasizes the joy that comes from engaging the truth of faith, and he argues that we are diminished by forgetting the unique and distinctive contributions of Christianity. More than brilliant exegesis, Manent enlists Pascal in a much greater endeavor: to make what he calls "the Christian proposition" concerning God and man intelligible to Europeans who have made it their business to ignore the religion that founded Europe and the larger Western world.
List of contents
Foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney
Translator's Introduction
Author's Foreword: Europe and the Question of Christianity
1. Confronting Atheism
2. How God Comes to Man
3. To Prove God?
4. The Human Phenomenon
5. Force and Justice in Human Order
6. The Illusions of the Self
7. Greatness and Misery
8. Liberator and Mediator
9. The Style of the Gospel
10. Certainty and Salvation
Conclusion: Fear and Joy
About the author
Pierre Manent is professor emeritus of political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of numerous books, including
Montaigne: Life without Law.
Paul Seaton is an independent scholar of political philosophy, with a special focus on French political thought. He has written extensively on modern and contemporary French thinkers, as well as translated works by Rémi Brague, Benjamin Constant, Chantal Delsol, and Pierre Manent.
Daniel J. Mahoney is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Assumption University.
