Nancy Pearcey’s latest book, Saving Leonardo (B&H, 2010), is a follow-up to her widely praised and influential Total Truth. This book is not just an introduction to the history of key philosophical and cultural ideas, but is also a wonderful entry into the interpretation of art. Filled with reproductions of paintings, ancient and modern, it’s a wonderful way to understand the cultural forces as seen in and through art. I highly recommend it.
Here are just a few of the endorsements:
“Nancy Pearcey is an intellectual prophet in our day and one of Evangelicalism’s foremost cultural observers. Saving Leonardo is a tour de force. In it, Pearcey provides a penetrating analysis of the nature of contemporary secularism, a helpful exposition of how we got to the present situation, and a well-crafted strategy for changing the situation. This is her best effort yet, and it is a must read for believers who want to make a difference in our world.”
— J. P. Moreland
“Nancy Pearcey is unsurpassed in the current generation of Christian thinkers in articulating the need for Christianity to stand as a counterforce to trends in contemporary American society. The magic continues with this book. Pearcey’s virtues as a writer and thinker are once again fully evident in the range of material that she has mastered, the encyclopedic collection of data that she presents, and the analytic rigor with which she separates truth from error in worldviews. Nancy Pearcey is a prophetic voice for contemporary Christians. In Saving Leonardo she illuminates a path by which Christians can forge the right worldview and avoid an unthinking drift into non-Christian worldviews.”
— Leland Ryken
“Nancy Pearcey has done it again and better than ever. She has taken the complex sophistication of the best cultural analysis and laid it out for any person to grasp, enjoy and use to live out their daily lives honoring Christ. An astounding accomplishment!”
— James W. Sire
“Brilliant . . . wide-ranging and illuminating. . . . As she does in Total Truth, Pearcey turns the ‘fact/value’ distinction that has become a commonplace of modern thought into a powerful and sharp-edged tool by which she dissects both anti-Christian ideas and ineffectual Christian responses. Whereas Total Truth illustrated her points by concentrating on science, Saving Leonardo does so by concentrating on the arts. The effect is to bring complex, abstract ideas down-to-earth—or, rather, down-to-life—and to help Christians recognize non-Biblical thinking in the culture and in themselves. . . . Saving Leonardo bridges the gaps between the arts and the sciences, the theoretical and the practical. The book not only argues for the unity of Christian truth but exemplifies that unity and shows it in action.”
— Gene Edward Veith
