Death of Satan - How Americans Have Lost Sense of Evil

Description

That our society absolutely requires a sense of evil to maintain its cultural center forms this work's hue and cry. Irony, which now permeates our modern sensibilities, has come to dominate not only the formation of the American sense of evil but its current obsolete status. In its place is a secular liberalism, a cultural wasteland that Delbanco (The Puritan Ordeal, Harvard Univ. Pr., 1989) claims, "has deluded itself into believing that human beings can manage without any metaphor at all." Steeped in literature, history, and theology, Delbanco's critique of the unique American psyche as discerned through its sons (mainly) grapples with the reality of something we feel "that our culture no longer gives vocabulary to express." Masterly and thoroughly presented, this is a discussion, not a diatribe. Delbanco's national spiritual biography aptly chronicles the modern malaise. Recommended for specialists and informed readers. The age of belief. The old enemy comes to the New World ; The devil in the Age of Reason ; The birth of the self -- Modern Times. The loss of providence ; The age of blame ; The culture of irony ; Prospects.