The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization

We had not heard of Jonathan Edwards’s book The Religious Affections (1746). Edwards, America’s first philosopher, based his teaching on St. Augustine’s trinitarian view of man derived from the New Testament. Edwards’s paradigm, Dixon said, was far more useful for clinical psychology than Charles Darwin’s 1872 book The Expressions of the Emotions i

Rodney Stark, in his authoritative study The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History,18 discusses the rise of Christianity in its early

I was grateful for Vinay’s insight, for I had never seen the connections of morality to liberty, liberty to the status of women, and the status of women to the strength of a society.

St. Augustine (AD 354–430) in affirming every human being as a trinity of existence (being), intellect, and will.

Several recent studies have explored the Bible’s role in launching modern science. For nonspecialists, an excellent starting point is Rodney Stark’s book For the Glory of God. Stark,

Secular historians have yet to compute Comenius’s contributions to the modern world.

William Carey, a young cobbler turned linguist, published what became the manifesto of modern Western Protestant missions: “An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen.” He

By contrast, the biblical view made modern science possible by enabling the Christian mind to be content with partial and finite knowledge, which grows incrementally through coordinated efforts over generations.

The family, not the monastery, was the divinely ordained school of character.