The Death of Christian Culture
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About This Book [ what the critics are saying | table of contents | about the author(s) ]
When it was first published in 1978, The Death of Christian Culture had been long awaited and sold out quickly. It is a hard-hitting and scholarly tour de force, dealing with the root causes of how and why Christian culture is dying. Its method is the in-depth but always provocative and engaging study of literature, culture, history, and religion. Its aim is to alert citizens of Western civilization of what we stand to loose as education ceases to be about teaching the truth and more and more about merely bureaucratic training and ticket-punching. Its value is the warning it provides to concerned people everywhere that the cultural, literary, artistic, and social treasures of classical and Christian civilization must be preserved and lived, lest they be lost forever. Most impressive among John Senior's numerous credentials as a cultural historian, literary critic, and scholar and practitioner of education is his experience as founder and leader of the University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program, which he developed and ran with two colleagues at the University. The program was a four-semester course for freshmen and sophomores that combined the best of the Socratic method with the "great books" approach to education, while it was neither of those things alone. Its controversial aim was to convince students that there is a truth, and that the truth is worth knowing; its controversial method was the cultivation of "poetic knowledge," through real-life immersion in reading, memorization, and discussion of the classics of Western thought, art, and literature. Its controversial outcome was hundreds of conversions to Catholicism. This experience, more than any other, provided fruit for the keen insight and sometimes shocking observations presented in Senior's books.
What the Critics are Saying
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I knew John Senior for some 50 years. No one had the same success in defending and bringing others to the Catholic faith.
President Emeritus, Thomas Aquinas College"Death of Christian Culture . . . is the voice of a prophet crying in the cultural wilderness of the age."
Prior, Monastery of Our Lady of the Annunciation of Clear Creek"Stunning, beautiful, and terrifying, Senior's Death of Christian Culture stands as a proper eulogy for Western civilization."
Russell Amos Kirk Chair of History, Hillsdale College; author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth"Senior celebrates the glorious story of Christian culture as a love affair between Christ and His Church, and chastises the enemies of our tradition for their attempts to destroy this redeeming union."
Bishop of Cheyenne"Senior's book is brilliantly revealing of both the causes and effects of modernity's cultural crisis."
Associate Provost and Associate Professor of English, Hillsdale CollegeThe author unravels why ideology is the enemy and enthusiasm is its nasty brother.
Associate Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas"Death reminds us of Western civilization's treasury of wisdom, its perennial philosophy and great literature."
Professor of Humanities and the Trivium, Wyoming Catholic CollegeWith a philosopher’s mind, a teacher’s heart and a novelist’s soul, Dr. Senior expertly diagnoses modernity’s ills with force and energy in this classic book.
Latin Mass Magazine"Senior unmasks the modern culture wars . . . and exposes the chief disorders underlying the modern project."
Full Professor of Philosophy, St. John's UniversitySenior was the Catholic Socrates of the 20th century.
author, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of EducationTable of Contents
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Foreword —Andrew Senior |
About the Author(s)
John Senior, Ph.D.
Dr. John Senior was born in 1923 in Stamford, Conn. and grew up on rural Long Island, New York. He obtained his B.A. , M.A. , and Ph.D. at Columbia University. He was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics whose career spanned the latter half of the twentieth century, teaching at Bard College, Hofstra College, Cornell University, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Kansas. He converted to Catholicism in the late 1950s. While at the University of Kansas he founded the controversial Integrated Humanities Program with his colleagues Dennis Quinn and Frank Nelick. Towards the end of his life he became widely known and respected among the pioneers of the movement seeking to preserve Catholic orthodoxy in opposition to the trend of dilution that he believed characterized much of the development of Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council. He knew and counted as friends men such as Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Walter Matt, Michael Davies, Fr. Harry Marchosky, Fr. Vincent Miceli, Fr. Urban Snyder, Dr. William Marra, and Hamish Fraser. He died on April 8, 1999. His well-known and widely praised works include The Death of Christian Culture, The Restoration of Christian Culture, and The Restoration of Innocence: The Idea of a School.
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Andrew Senior studied under his father and his colleagues Frank Nelick and Dennis Quinn in the 1970s in the controversial Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, from where he holds degrees (B.A. and M.A.) in Classics. He also did post-graduate study in Rome at the Angelicum, the Gregorianum, and the Salesianum. He has worked as a diocesan director of religious education under the late Bishop David Maloney in the Diocese of Wichita, as a producer, director, and editor in television, and as a professor of Latin, English, history, and philosophy. He currently teaches at St. Mary’s College in St. Mary’s, Kansas.
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Dr. White graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in 1971. He earned his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin and his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He has taught at Temple University and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; he is currently a Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, where he has taught for 26 years. He edited Shakespeare A to Z, a Shakespeare encyclopedia, and is the author of The Mouth of the Lion and The Horn of the Unicorn. He does a monthly Shakespeare commentary with Hugh Hewitt (KRLA, Los Angeles; nationally syndicated on the Salem Radio Network).
