I’ve begun reading James Davison Hunter’s new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010). This is a highly significant book; I’m already benefiting from and being corrected and challenged by it. A website has been set up to further the conversation.
I’ll try to blog my way through the book, chapter by chapter (something I’ve never done with a book before).
In the preface Hunter explains that his concerns can be grouped into two broad categories, the academic and the personal.
The basic academic question is:
How is religious faith possible in the late modern world?
Related to this are questions like:
- Is it possible?
- How does the encounter of religious faith with modernity change the nature and experience of faith?
- How does it change modernity itself?
The personal question is related to the academic:
How do believers live out their faith under the conditions of the late modern world?
