Brad Gregory: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Harvard University Press 2012, 592 pp.
Risvolto
In a work that is as much about the present as the
past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the
Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern
condition over the course of the following five centuries. A
hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any
substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver,
consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a
movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which
Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and
moral life in the West.
Before the Protestant Reformation, Western
Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations
of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for
individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the
realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of
rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity
gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in
the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual
disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized
discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all
truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a
therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with
which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the
institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue
knowledge.
The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled
the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds
answers deep in our medieval Christian past.
La questione del cristianesimo contemporaneo vista dallo storico Gregory
Massimo Faggioli Europa 1 novembre 2012
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