In times like these, when so much is deeply unsettled in both the Church And the world, there are few reliable guides to our predicament. But one has just appeared: Daniel Mahoney's brief but powerful book: The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.
A few decades back, American evangelicals used to denounce secular humanism, rightly – but without knowing what it was other than a denial of religion. During the same period, St. John Paul II tried to recover an authentic Christian humanism, i.e., a rich “anthropology” in which the human person is only rightly understood in relation to God.
A Christian humanism is necessary because unless we properly value life in this world, religion can become distorted, a kind of Puritanism that denies our nature as creatures with bodies, minds, and spirits.
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