The Theological Origins of Modernity, by Michael Allen Gillespie

Michael Allen Gillespie tackles a perennial topic in the history of ideas—the emergence of the “modern” worldview and its relation to the theology of the premodern past—with originality and insight. The sweep of his book is particularly ambitious and impressive. Gillespie manages the difficult task of balancing more than a dozen sharply drawn intellectual portraits of major Western thinkers, while at the same time fitting each of these individual puzzle pieces together into a complex and persuasive metanarrative about the origins of our modern values.