Denver Catholic

26 DENVER CATHOLIC | JULY 11-24, 2020 Perspectives T here is no doubt that Western culture is in crisis. The American founding, despite its embrace of the separation of Church and State, relied upon an undergirding of Christian culture for its success. One of the chief characteristics of a Christian culture stems from its integration of faith and reason. The Bible itself led the way for early Christians by referring to Jesus as the Logos, the word or reason of God made flesh. The Church helped build Western civilization by preserving and synthesizing the philosophical, literary, political, and artistic legacy of the ancient world and drawing these contributions into a Christian way of life. That civilization, however, has been tottering under unrelenting attacks, as modern thinkers and politicians have driven a wedge between faith and reason and sought to replace it with utopian dreams of continual, material progress. The split has undermined the integrity of both faith and reason, as everything seems up for grabs in world shaped by individualism and the will to power. One bishop poignantly speaks of surviving a modern, materialist regime bent on brutal oppression. Athanasius Schneider, an auxiliary bishop serving in Kazakhstan, grew up in the Soviet Union within an exiled German family. Within an interview book, Chistus Vincit: Christ's Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age (Angelico, 2019), in conversation with Diane Montagna, he offers a wide-ranging perspective on the chal- lenges of the Church in the modern world. I found his reflections of his childhood the most compelling aspect of the book, as he described grow- ing up in persecution under the influence of the strong devotion and faith of his family. This experience has led to a radical fidelity to the Church's teaching and strong resistance to any attempt to water down the teaching and practice of the Church in the face of modern influences. He puts his finger on the source of our crisis of faith as rooted in a "secularism [that] started with anthropocentrism ... In the religious sphere, man declared himself the center, and this is subjectivism" (52). To overcome this "loss of the supernatural," Schneider calls Catholics to a renewed encounter with Christ by adhering to the truth he revealed and to a greater rever- ence of his presence in the Eucharist. Another account, one that focuses more on the eclipse of reason, complements Schneider's book. Samuel Gregg 's Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (Regnery, 2019) offers a broad narrative stretching from the foundations of philosophy in the ancient world, the building of Christian culture by the Church, to the eclipse of both faith in reason in the modern world. Even when deal- ing with difficult philosophical issues, Gregg maintains a clear, elegant, and accessible prose. He summarizes the general thrust of the book: "The West's integration of creation, freedom, justice, and faith is always fragile, and undermining any one of them undercuts the others. Without cre- ation, the intelligibility of the universe is hard to sustain. Without intel- ligibility, freedom is only a mirage, justice a sophism, and faith nothing Responding to the crisis of faith and reason DR. R. JARED STAUDT The Catholic Reader R. Jared Staudt, PhD, is a husband and father of six, the director of formation for the Archdiocese of Denver, a Benedictine oblate, prolific writer, and insatiable reader.

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