The Year of Our Lord 1943

We end our reading of the book vastly better informed about the culture and thought of the 1940s, and amply equipped to see how those ideas would resonate over the next three or four decades. Alan Jacobs has written book. --Phillip Jenkins, The Englewood Review of Books Alan Jacobs weaves a remarkable tale of five major Christian thinkers striving to make sense of a world in chaos and to speak wisdom to that world. This is a major achievement, wonderfully readable, the crowning work of our own era's most resourceful Christian intellectual. --Charles Marsh, Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Project on Lived Theology, University of Virginia Alan Jacob's prose wears immense learning lightly, with great grace and to great effect. To think alongside these writers, under Jacobs's stage direction, to hear them across a gap of three-quarters of a century think with gravity and sincerity, pondering the nature of the human soul, palpably straining toward the ideal of the common good, feeling the pull of their religion's perennial pitfalls, in a situation and language different from and yet not wholly unlike our own, is riveting, challenging, and life-giving. --Lori Branch, author of Rituals of Spontaneity Alan Jacobs has written an elegant and deeply learned book on Christian humanism in the critical years of the Second World War. He opens a window into some of the most luminous and profound thinking about the nature and possibilities of civilization during those troubled years. By doing so, has opened a window for thinking about our own troubled times. -James D. Hunter, author of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World Jacobs seems to have written this with an eye to the time between the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the events of 9/11, when it seemed that democracy had finally achieved peace, only to find it widely rejected. His look at how these five figures struggled with similar turns of events is worth pondering. --Library Journal While Jacobs can only begin to scratch the surface of such complex debates, his book is an erudite collective portrait of postwar Christian intellectuals. --Publishers Weekly Alan Jacobs's new book, The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, traces a fascinating intellectual debate that arose on the Western home front during World War II...The five protagonists of Jacobs's book serve as excellent guides to the Academy of Christian, humanistic learning. --Jeffrey Bilbro, Front Porch Republic