Enquiries into Religion and Culture

The essays presented in this volume are among the most wide-ranging, intellectually rich, and diverse of Christopher Dawson's reflections on the relations of faith and culture. In them, he explores the contact between the spiritual life of the individual and the social and economic organization of modern culture. His focus ranges from the passing of industrialism to the Catholic understanding of the human person, to Islamic mysticism, to a Christian account of sexuality.

Dawson argues that modern Western culture is unique in its tendency to ignore its spiritual roots and its once close contact with nature and tradition, and to substitute for them an impersonal economic and materialist organization of mass society. In these essays, he warns against the increasingly secular preoccupations of modern sociological accounts of European culture and insists that they require the supplement and corrective of theology and philosophy. But he is equally insistent on the dangers of a false spiritualism that ignores emerging sociological insights.

Widely praised as one of the most important Catholic historians of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson, in all of his writings, masterfully brings various disciplinary perspectives and historical sources into a complex unity of expression and applies them to concrete conditions of modern society.