“No one can understand the present crisis in the United States and the West without understanding the sixties.” So writes Os Guinness in the preface to a new edition of The Dust of Death, which he first wrote almost 50 years ago. On this program, Shane Rosenthal talks with Os about many of the themes he addressed in that book, and how this important cultural shift has affected both American culture, and American religion, down to the present day.
Show Quote:
Today we have a convergence of neo-Marxism and postmodernism where God and truth are dead and everything is relative and socially constructed. At its root, everything is about power. These new modernists analyze the pyramids of power—all of the social relations—and look for the oppressor and the oppressed, the bully and the victim. When they have found their victim, they weaponize him as an assault on the status quo.
Os Guinness
Recommended:
DUST OF DEATH
Author: Os Guinness
In this milestone work, leading social critic Guinness provides a wide-ranging, farsighted analysis of one of the most pivotal decades in Western history, the 1960s. He examines the twentieth-century developments of secular humanism, the technological society, and the alternatives offered by the counterculture, including radical politics, Eastern religions, and psychedelic drugs. As all of these options have increasingly failed to deliver on their promises, Guinness argues, Westerners desperately need another alternative―a Third Way. This way “holds the promise of realism without despair, involvement without frustration, hope without romanticism.” It offers a stronger humanism, one with a solid basis for its ideals, combining truth and beauty. And this Third Way can be found only in the rediscovery and revival of the historic Christian faith.
Fools Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion
Author: Os Guinness
In our post-Christian context, public life has become markedly more secular and private life infinitely more diverse. Yet many Christians still rely on cookie-cutter approaches to evangelism and apologetics. Most of these methods assume that people are open, interested and needy for spiritual insight when increasingly most people are not. Our urgent need, then, is the capacity to persuade―to make a convincing case for the gospel to people who are not interested in it. In his magnum opus, Os Guinness offers a comprehensive presentation of the art and power of creative persuasion. Christians have often relied on proclaiming and preaching, protesting and picketing.
The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It
Author: Os Guinness
In a world torn apart by religious extremism on the one side and a strident secularism on the other, no question is more urgent than how we live with our deepest differences—especially our religious and ideological differences. The Case for Civility is a proposal for restoring civility in America as a way to foster civility around the world. Influential Christian writer and speaker Os Guinness makes a passionate plea to put an end to the polarization of American politics and culture that—rather than creating a public space for real debate—threatens to reverse the very principles our founders set into motion and that have long preserved liberty, diversity, and unity in this country.
