Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century

Tadie, Andrew A. and MacDonald, Michael H. ; Editors

ISBN 10: 0802838049 / ISBN 13: 9780802838049

Published by Eerdmans Pub Co, Grand Rapids, MI, 1995

About this Item

Stated first edition with complete number line beginning with "1". Clean dust jacket with mild wear. No stains or tears. Now mylar-protected. Boards are clean, spine is tight. Lower board ends and spine tail are bumped. Previous owner's pastedown on FFL. No highlighting. No price listed. Not remaindered or library withdrawn. Shipped padded in a box with tracking number provided on domestic shipping.

Seller Inventory # 004421

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Permanent Things: Toward the Recovery of a More Human Scale at the End of the Twentieth Century
• Publisher: Eerdmans Pub Co, Grand Rapids, MI
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802838049
• ISBN 13: 9780802838049
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Religion
  • nonfiction

About this title

Synopsis

Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it.
How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things.
The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word.