This is the book we have been waiting for . . . a permanent enrichment of our understanding of the Oxford Movement" proclaimed The Downside Review upon the publication of Christopher Dawson's masterwork in 1933, exactly 100 years after John Keble's sermon National Apostasy stirred a nation. Dawson himself regarded the book as one of his two greatest intellectual accomplishments. Dawson and John Henry Newman were Oxonians and both were converts to Catholicism; both stood against progressive and liberal movements within society. In both ideologies, Dawson saw a pathway that had once led to the French Revolution. Newman, for Dawson, was a kindred spirit. In The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, Dawson goes beyond a mere retelling of the events of 1833-1845. He shows us the prime movers who sought a deeper understanding of the Anglican tradition: the quixotic Hurrell Froude, for instance, who "had none of the English genius for compromise or the Anglican faculty of shutting the eyes to unpleasant facts." It was Froude who brought Newman and Keble together and who helped them understand each other. In many ways, Dawson sees these three as the true embodiment of the Tractarian ethos. Dawson probes deeply, though, to provide a richer, clearer understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of the Oxford Movement, revealing its spiritual raison d'etre. We meet a group of gifted like-minded thinkers, albeit with sharp disagreements, who mock outsiders and each other, who pepper their letters with Latin, and forever urge each other on. Newman came to believe, as did Dawson, that the only intellectually coherent bastion against secular culture was religion, and the "on" to which they were urged was the Catholic church. The Spirit of the Oxford Movement provides insights into why Newman, and Dawson, came to this understanding.

This title presents works of Christopher Dawson. ""The Crisis of Western Education"", originally published in 1961, served as a capstone of Christopher Dawson's thought on the Western educational system. Long out of print, the book has now been updated with a new introduction by Glenn W. Olsen and is included in the ongoing ""Works of Christopher Dawson"" series. In all of his writings, Dawson masterfully brings various disciplinary perspectives and historical sources into a complex unity of expression and applies them to concrete conditions of modern society. Dawson argued that Western culture had become increasingly defined by a set of economic and political preoccupations ultimately hostile to its larger spiritual end. Inevitably, its educational systems also became increasingly technological and pragmatic, undermining the long standing emphasis on liberal learning and spiritual reflection which were hallmarks of the Christian humanism that created it. In this important work on the Western educational system, Dawson traces the history of these developments and argues that Western civilization can only be saved by redirecting its entire educational system from its increasing vocationalism and specialization. He insists that the Christian college must be the cornerstone of such an educational reform. However, he argued that this redirection would require a much more organic and comprehensive study of the living Christian tradition than had been attempted in the past. Dawson had reservations about educational initiatives that had been developed in response to this crisis of education. Among them, he expressed doubts about newly emerging great books programs fearing that they would reduce the great tradition of a living culture to a set of central texts or great ideas. In contrast, he insisted that a Christian education had to be concerned with 'how spiritual forces are transmitted and how they change culture, often in unexpected ways'. This would require an understanding of the living and vital character of culture. As Dawson saw it, 'culture is essentially a network of relations, and it is only by studying a number of personalities that you can trace this network'. Dawson offers a diagnosis of modern education and proposes the retrieval of an organic and living culture which alone has the power to renew Western culture.

In this work, Christopher Dawson concludes that the period of the 4th to the 11th centuries, commonly known as the Dark Ages, was not a barren prelude to the creative energy of the mediaeval world. Instead, he argues that it is better described as ""ages of dawn"", for it was in this rich and confused period that the complex and creative interaction of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, the classical tradition and barbarous societies provided the foundation for a vital, unified European culture. In an age of fragmentation and the emergence of new nationalist forces, Dawson argued that if ""our civilization is to survive, it is essential that it should develop a common European consciousness and sense of historic and organic unity"". But he was clear that this unity required sources deeper and more complex than the political and economic movements on which so many had come to depend, and he insisted, prophetically, that Europe would need to recover its Christian roots if it was to survive.

In this new edition of his classic work, "Religion and the Rise of Western Culture," Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. With the magisterial sweep of Toynbee, to whom he is often compared, Dawson tells here the tale of medieval Christendom. From the brave travels of sixth-century Irish monks to the grand synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Dawson brilliantly shows how vast spiritual movements arose from tiny origins and changed the face of medieval Europe from one century to the next. The legacy of those years of ferment remains with us in the great cathedrals, Gregorian chant, and the works of Giotto and Dante. Even more, though, for Dawson these centuries charged the soul of the West with a spiritual concern -- a concern that he insists "can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself."