TY  - BOOK
AU  - Hart,David Bentley
TI  - Atheist delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies 
SN  - 9780300164299
AV  - BR 162.3 .H37 2009
U1  - 909/.09821 22
PY  - 2009///
CY  - New Haven
PB  - Yale University Press
KW  - Church history
KW  - Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600
KW  - Civilization, Western
KW  - Christianity
KW  - Influence
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-249) and index; Introduction -- Faith, reason, and freedom : a view from the present -- The gospel of unbelief -- The age of freedom -- The mythology of the secular age : modernity's rewriting of the Christian past -- Faith and reason -- The night of reason -- The destruction of the past -- The death and rebirth of science -- Intolerance and persecution -- Intolerance and war -- An age of darkness -- Revolution : the Christian invention of the human -- The great rebellion -- A glorious sadness -- A liberating message -- The face of the faceless -- The death and birth of worlds -- Divine humanity -- Reaction and retreat : modernity and the eclipse of the human -- Secularism and its victims -- Sorcerers and saints
N2  - Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the "Age of Reason" was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values. --from publisher desciption
ER  -