Musings of a Christian Humanist

            As with Erasmus, I affirm that  The Imitation of Christ  by Thomas A'Kempis is the grandest of devotional reads. The devotional books that litter the bookstores, especially the local Christian bookstore are more shaped by the lowest common denominator of trivial therapeutic drivel, the "cutting edge" madness of the management class, or silly self-help books that know nothing about the complexities of the human self and never address the matter of how a self so open to self deception can really help that same self. The insipid devotional books reign supreme.       In this dismal situation there is a bright ray of devotional greatness that arrives. Actually, it is making a bit of a second coming. Originally published in 1976, Thomas Howard's Hallowed Be This House has been reprinted by Ignatius Press. My wife and I have been reading it (almost finished) and it has changed our sense of place. Thomas...

As a number of books from important thinkers (Etienne Gilson, Jeffrey Burton Russell) have sought to educate open-minded readers to a most enlightened Middle Ages, Zimmermann seeks, in part, to challenge some misinterpretations and terrible damage done to a most Christian era--the Renaissance. According to Zimmerman, the roots of secularism and secularization are not to be found in the Renaissance, but at a later time and in different soil. At worst, there were some bad seeds planted here and there that later produced mixed fruit even during the Renaissance, but not all the bad seed can be be attributed to that age.     This book is difficult to specify the type of analysis it offers. Zimmermann moves in a most erudite manner from one discipline to another, is conversant with a breadth of primary sources, and clearly familiar with the secondary and therefore derivative and sometimes misguided sources. Structurally, the work is a survey of the Western intellec...