The Praise of 'sons of Bitches' - 9781587316548

"This book tries to return to the first obligation of the Christian, that of worshipping God. It argues that contemporary Christian thought and practice, insofar as they are moved away from the center, usually in the name of social action or ecology, have changed the essential meaning and purpose of human life in the Christian tradition. Christianity has always been concerned with the common man. It has not doubted his finiteness and his fallenness, but it has also insisted that this is the kind of person who is called to share in the life of the Triune God. It is therefore uncompromising in insisting that the worship of God comes first, and this enables Christians to transcend any secular ideology which pretends priority to this worship. The mood of thebook is mainly light-hearted. It falls largely into the tradition of sanity and humor that have come to be associated with the particularly English Christianity of such writers as Chesterton and Belloc, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Mascall. Within that tradition it argues that the centrality of the basic dogmas of our faith is precisely what frees us both from the solemnity of contemporary ideologies and for Christian laughter--the Divine Comedy"--