Progress and Religion was perhaps the most influential of all Christopher Dawson's books, establishing him as an interpreter of history and a historian of ideas.

Christopher Dawson wrote The Judgment of the Nations in 1942, in the midst of the horrors of World War II.

*A new edition of Christopher Dawsons classic work on Christian higher education*

As a historian of ideas, Christopher Dawson was one of the most distinguished Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. He was a scholar of immense erudition, a writer of great style and fluency, and the first Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic studies at Harvard. It is in the field of the history of ideas that he achieved his most lasting influence. This biography by Christina Scott, Dawson's daughter, is a sensitive portrait of a complex and fascinating scholar. The author's first-hand knowledge and her access to unpublished family memoirs has enabled her to paint a convincing picture of the basic personal security provided by Dawson's private life, his friendships, and his deep Christian faith-a personal security all too often required as a bulwark against the vicissitudes and disappointments of his public life. Dawson's Catholicism proved a problem to advancement in his academic career; and when public recognition of his true stature finally came, in the form of the Stillman Chair, it came late in life and in a country other than his own. Christina Scott shows that Dawson is best understood as he himself interpreted his historical subjects-in the context of "the spiritual world in which he lived, the ideas that moved him, and the faith that inspired his action." Dawson was not a historian of ideas for their own sake; he had a passionate belief in their liberating power. "A Historian and His World "will be of interest to intellectual historians, historians of religion, and students of modern Catholic thought. This is the first publication of the Dawson biography in the United States. It is graced by a postscript written by Christopher Dawson reflecting upon the meaning of his work.

In scope and in vision Christopher Dawson’s historiography ranks with the work of men like Spengler, Northrop, and Toynbee. Several major themes run through Dawson’s work, but perhaps his most unique contribution was his insistence on the importance of religion in shaping and sustaining civilizations. Religion, Dawson believed, is the great creative force in any culture, and the loss of a society’s historic religion therefore portends a process of social dissolution. For this reason, Dawson concluded that Western society must find a way to revitalize its spiritual life if it is to avoid irreversible decay. Progress, the real religion of modernity, is insufficient to sustain cultural health. And an ahistorical, secularized Christianity is an oxymoron, a pseudo-religion only nominally related to the historic religion of the West. Dawson maintained that the hope of the present age lay in the reconciliation of the religious tradition of Christianity with the intellectual tradition of humanism and the new knowledge about man and nature provided by modern science. Dynamics of World History shows that though such a task may be difficult, it is not impossible.

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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

English historian and Christian humanist Christopher Dawson stood at the very center of the Catholic literary and intellectual revival in the four decades preceding Vatican II. One can find his influence throughout the twentieth-century Catholic Right. Poet and social critic T. S. Eliot considered him the foremost thinker of his generation, and the founder of American conservatism, Russell Kirk, wrote that he had been "saturated in Dawsonian historical studies [and] my own books reflect Dawson's concepts." Dawson's reputation declined dramatically during the cultural shifts accompanying Vatican II, and few remembered the English Catholic in the final decades of the twentieth century. A revival of interest of Dawson and his body of work increased dramatically in the last years of John Paul II's and the beginning of Benedict's pontificates. This book offers the first study of Dawson's life and thought as a whole. It is especially poignant as a post-9/11 reexamination of the meaning of Western civilization. Sanctifying the World was named by biographer Joseph Pearce as the best book of 2008 and the National Catholic Register named it one of the top eleven books of the year.

The English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was the first Catholic Studies professor at Harvard University and has been described as one of the foremost Catholic thinkers of modern times. His focus on culture prefigured its importance in Catholicism since Vatican Council II and in the rise of mainstream cultural history in the late twentieth century. How did Dawson think about culture and why does it matter? Joseph T. Stuart argues that through Dawson’s study of world cultures, he acquired a “cultural mind” by which he attempted to integrate knowledge according to four implicit rules: intellectual architecture, boundary thinking, intellectual asceticism, and intellectual bridges. Dawson’s multilayered approach to culture, instantiating John Henry Newman’s philosophical habit of mind, is key to his work and its relevance. By it, he responded to the cultural fragmentation he sensed after the Great War (1914-1918). Stuart supports these claims by demonstrating how Dawson formed his cultural mind practicing an interdisciplinary science of culture involving anthropology, sociology, history, and comparative religion. Stuart shows how Dawson applied his cultural thinking to problems in politics and education. This book establishes how Dawson’s simple definition of culture as a “common way of life” reconciles intellectualist and behavioral approaches to culture. In addition, Dawson’s cultural mind provides a synthesis helpful for recognizing the importance of Christian culture in education. It demonstrates principles which construct a more meaningful cultural history. Anyone interested in the idea of culture, the connection of religion to the social sciences, Catholic Studies, or Dawson studies will find this book an engaging and insightful intellectual history.