Christopher Dawson Archives ~ Page 6 of 8 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Christopher Dawson: Quotable & Admirer of the Saints

By W. Winston Elliott III|2016-11-04T19:18:58-05:00May 28th, 2013|Categories: Books, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, W. Winston Elliott III|Tags: Christopher Dawson's Saints, Justin Press, The Annotated Quotable Dawson|

Our friends at Justin Press have recently published two wonderful books especially appealing to those of us who share their admiration of the brilliant English historian Christopher Dawson. The Annotated Quotable Dawson Christopher Dawson, the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, remains the final authority on the relation between religion and culture and is [...]

Religion & Culture: Christopher Dawson as Superlative Guide

By Robert M. Woods|2016-08-03T10:37:11-05:00May 10th, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, Religion, Robert M. Woods|

There is a popular series of books entitled, “Eat This, Not That.” The premise of the series is that of all the foods out there, some are healthier for you than others or some are not as unhealthy as others. We can classify this essay as a “Read This, Not That.” With the growing number [...]

The Movement of World Revolution: Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2018-02-13T09:45:12-06:00March 18th, 2013|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured|

The Movement of World Revolution by Christopher Dawson (The Catholic University of America Press) Having witnessed the loss of an idyllic Edwardian world to the deadening trenches of the first world war, the rise of communism and the gulag state in Slavic Europe and China, and the advent of national socialism and the holocaust camps in [...]

Sanctifying the World: Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2023-05-12T10:48:36-05:00March 18th, 2013|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, TIC Featured Book|

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, by Bradley J. Birzer Featured Book: Since religion is the heart of culture, Dawson wrote, then “religion is the key to history;” therefore “[w]e cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion.” To understand Europe and the West, then, [...]

Read Christopher Dawson or Russell Kirk, Not Hoffman

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-02-12T15:28:29-06:00February 18th, 2013|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk|

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to review Lord Percy’s Heresy of Democracy, a book Russell Kirk considered essential for an understanding of conservatism in the 1950s. Another book he had in list that was more or less unfamiliar to me was Ross J.S. Hoffman’s The Spirit of Politics and the Future of [...]

Religion and the Rise of Western Culture: Christopher Dawson

By W. Winston Elliott III|2016-11-04T19:19:02-05:00February 16th, 2013|Categories: Books, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, TIC Featured Book, W. Winston Elliott III|Tags: TIC Featured Book|

In Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. Click the link below to find this, and other books by Christopher Dawson, in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore! We hope you will join us [...]

Christopher Dawson: The Twofold Nature of Christian History

By Gerald Russello|2016-08-03T10:37:18-05:00January 29th, 2013|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Gerald Russello, History|Tags: 1CM|

Christopher Dawson Christopher Dawson wrote with two different audiences in mind. He sought both to displace the bankrupt Victorian and Edwardian liberalism of his own day and to shake the complacency of his coreligionists who preferred to bask in the quickly fading light of false medievalism. His carefully crafted prose revealed a nuanced and original understanding [...]

Remembering an Eastern Orthodox Prophet: Nicholas Berdyaev

By Bradley J. Birzer|2020-07-16T10:54:02-05:00January 16th, 2013|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Orthodoxy, Senior Contributors|Tags: Nicholas Berdyaev|

Nicholas Berdyaev stressed the primacy of culture and theological issues over politics and economics as truer forms of reality. He argued that only when society has realigned itself, individual by individual and community by community, “towards divine objects” could humanity save itself. One kind of weird but enticing academic puzzle for me is discovering and [...]

Judgment of the Nations: Christopher Dawson

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:37:22-05:00November 24th, 2012|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured|

I mentioned in an essay last week that it had been eleven years exactly since I’d read my first book by Christopher Dawson. That book, 1942’s Judgment of the Nations, remains my favorite of Dawson’s works. I spent the entire Thanksgiving break that year, 2001, reading Dawson. I had found the book at Hyde Brothers Books [...]

Just Beyond Our Grasp: Personal Reflections on Christian Humanism

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:37:23-05:00November 16th, 2012|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Conservatism, J.R.R. Tolkien, Natural Law, Russell Kirk, Western Civilization|

Over the last decade and a half, as many readers of TIC have probably noted, I’ve had the blessed opportunity of researching and writing about Russell Kirk (1918-1994), generally agreed upon as the founder of post-war American conservatism. At first, I did this mostly as a hobby, having become intensely interested in Christian Humanism through [...]

Christopher Dawson and the Humility of the Liberal Arts

By Bradley J. Birzer|2021-07-06T10:50:56-05:00October 10th, 2012|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Liberal Learning|

One of the greatest Catholic intellects and writers of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), worried deeply about the ideological, political, and cultural crises of the western world during the entirety of his adult life. The root of the problem, Dawson had come to believe between the two world wars, was the fundamental decline in [...]

Western Civilization–Old School via Professor Dawson

By Robert M. Woods|2016-02-18T18:24:37-06:00June 16th, 2012|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Liberal Learning, Robert M. Woods|

Before all the noise, bizarre theories, revisionists approaches, and misinterpretations of Western Civilization there was a brilliant and dedicated scholar who carefully studied primary documents and a range of cultural and social artifacts. His research and passion yielded much fruit, and in his day, Christopher Dawson was recognized as a world class cultural historian. Then [...]

Christopher Dawson on Liberalism

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:37:30-05:00June 7th, 2012|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Featured, Liberalism|

Christopher Dawson Part III: Contending Against Liberalism (click on links to go to Part I or Part II) As Dawson attempted to discover the sources of the ideological disruptions of the twentieth-century as well as solutions to the death and terror they caused, he often produced some of his most impassioned work. The forerunner to such [...]

Christopher Dawson on Liberalism

By Bradley J. Birzer|2016-08-03T10:37:32-05:00June 4th, 2012|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Liberalism|

Christopher Dawson Part II: The Fulfillment of Liberalism (find Part I) In the end, Dawson believed, liberalism destroyed far more than it created. By the end of the eighteenth century, he feared, little of traditional western culture—beyond the Protestant Americans and the Lutheran and Catholic peasants of Europe—remained religious. The dominant political philosophy of that [...]