The Closing of the Western Mind
The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason

The powers that be had a reason for forcing a standard doctrine across the empire and forced uniformity onto what was once diverse with no agreed upon overriding consensus, and this book will delve into that while actually showing that religious truths of today were sometimes determined by fiat. Whe......more

I was loaned this book by an old friend who at that time was a professor of the classics at Loyola University Chicago. Raised a Catholic in St. Louis and having gone to school at Holy Cross and Loyola as a student, first, of astronomy and then of the classics, he was--and is--not very sympathetic to......more

This was an incredible history of the transition from the classical world to the medieval world, centering in particular on the rise of Christianity within the context of an increasingly brittle, and thus authoritarian, Roman empire. One of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. In one poignant p......more

A meticulously constructed discussion of how the rise of orthodox Christianity as a means of imposing social control in the crumbling Roman Empire led to the suppression of the classical tradition of rational and empirical inquiry, supplanting reason with faith. The result was a centuries long retre......more

While I'm not completely convinced of the author's central argument--that the rise of Christianity and the waning of Greek intellectual tradition were not merely coincident, but that the former has a causal relationship with the latter--I have to say that this is an absolutely riveting history of ea......more