Faithful Presence

James Davison Hunter says our strategies to transform culture are ineffective, and the goal itself is misguided.
Interview by Christopher Benson
5/14/2010

Over two decades have passed since Allan Bloom's famous polemic, The Closing of the American Mind, shook up the American academy. The time is ripe for another shakeup. Enter James Davison Hunter, whose latest contribution, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford), promises to shake up American Christianity. An endorsement for Bloom's book applies just as well to Hunter's: It "will be savagely attacked. And, indeed, it deserves it, as this is the destiny of all important books … Reading it will make many people indignant, but leave nobody indifferent."

Hunter, professor of religion, culture, and social theory at the University of Virginia, is author of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America and The Death of Character: On the Moral Education of America's Children.

Interview

To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World
by James Davison Hunter
Oxford University Press,
April 2010368 pp., $27.95