Spiritual Lights in Benighted Times: Fifteen Christian Outliers

Spiritual Lights in Benighted Times brings together fifteen modern Christian thinkers—philosophers, theologians, monks and mystics, novelists among them—who have wrestled with some of the most urgent issues of our times. As the title suggests, being a serious Christian in the modern world is necessarily to be out of tune with the prevailing Zeitgeist, at odds with the secular-materialist-technocratic worldview now holding sway in most parts of the world. Most of these thinkers found cause for deep alarm in this state of affairs. These short sketches are neither biographies nor overviews. Rather, they are, mainly, discursive and informal pieces that pursue an isolated theme or a single aspect of the thinking of the person in question. With one exception all of the featured thinkers spent most of their lives in the 20th century. The author is well-known for his interest in Christian critiques of modernity, a theme that comes into sharper focus when the purview is restricted to this period. Other recurrent themes include the “problem” of religious pluralism, the timeless relevance of the perennial philosophy, and the place of mysticism in religious life. The book is addressed to anyone with an interest in “Christian thought” in any of its variegated and sometimes wildly divergent expressions. Included in this work are: Fyodor Dostoevsky Rudolf Otto Evelyn Underhill A.P. Elkin Dorothy Sayers Bede Griffiths Simone Weil Abhishiktananda Thomas Merton Huston Smith Philip Sherrard Martin Luther King Jr James Cowan Marilynne Robinson Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn