The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs
The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs
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The Year of Our Lord 1943
Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis

Author: Alan Jacobs

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 8 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/28/2018

Synopsis

By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear that the Allies would win the Second World War. Around the same time, it also became increasingly clear to many Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic that the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. A war won by technological superiority merely laid the groundwork for a post-war society governed by technocrats. These Christian intellectuals-Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others-sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.

In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the Western democracies. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is the first book to weave together the ideas of these five intellectuals and shows why, in a time of unprecedented total war, they all thought it vital to restore Christianity to a leading role in the renewal of the Western democracies.

About Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University. His most recent books are The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography and a critical edition of W. H. Auden's long poem For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Cindy on November 20, 2020

Recommended to my by my co-host of The Literary Life Podcast, @AngelinaStanford, this book is one that the minute you finish it you want to pick it right back up. The ideas are dense and therefore it leaves your brain turning a hundred miles an hour but it does a great job of looking at modernity th......more

Goodreads review by Murtaza on September 12, 2018

In the midst of World War II, a group of Christian intellectuals sorting through the wreckage of their collapsing world tried to articulate a basis for its spiritual rejuvenation. Simone Weil, W.H, Auden, C.S. Lewis and Jacques Mauritain were among a group of sensitive people who began to realize du......more

Goodreads review by Kris on August 20, 2019

This really isn’t a book. This is a collection of random research notes that Jacobs took down, in preparation for writing a book. I wish I could read the book these notes should have turned into. But sadly this isn’t it. As much as I like Jacobs’s writing and research interests (and this is getting t......more

Goodreads review by Scriptor Ignotus on May 27, 2023

Even as the fiery course of the Second World War was wheeling toward an Allied victory, a diverse group of Western intellectuals, united only by their—at times tenuous and belated—Christian commitments, ruminated over the meaning of such an unprecedented disaster. The Nazi phenomenon baffled the con......more

Goodreads review by Brenton on February 05, 2019

In 2012 I was at a dinner table at my first C.S. Lewis conference, the biannual Lewis & Friend colloquium at Taylor University in Indiana. I was admittedly a little out of place, a bit far from home and presenting my ideas for the first time. I grabbed my food and as I find a circle of people one of......more

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