On Christendom's Far Shore describes and explains American society by first illuminating its foundational stones: the traditional western (Judeo-Christian) faith in God and the West's once common understanding of the natural order and the nature and destiny of man. It explores the biblical concepts of faith, paradox, tragedy and grace, time, gender relations, love, work, play, individual and communal responsibilities, freedom, and the Kingdom of Heaven. The book illustrates how these ideas and values underlie more specifically American values and American social and governmental patterns and structures, such as the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, the creation of families and larger social groups and communities, the mentoring of future generations, and people's understanding of self-governance and how to relate to other nations. On Christendom's Far Shore depicts the present as a time of twilight with the United States caught up in a cataclysmic clash between a traditional understanding of man and of a God-centered universe and a post-modern, existential, man-centered, multicultural worldview that rejects the old values and structures and determinedly seeks a vast restructuring of the nation's social and political order and character.

The first decade of the twenty-first century finds the American people divided along a great, half-century-old fault line. On one side stand Traditionalists who understand human existence and glory (joys and sorrows) as defined by a western religious heritage, an existence circumscribed by tragedy. On the other side stand Secularists who reject the western tradition and its moral absolutes (even though they continue to espouse values that arose out of the West) and look forward to a world of ever-expanding personal freedom from societal restraints and old human weaknesses, a world wherein mankind will finally achieve total well-being For fifty years, Traditionalists and Secularists have been arguing over religion and their very different understandings of the meaning of freedom. Does the old religion, the western tradition as manifested in the United States, sustain and strengthen freedom or does it circumscribe freedom so much that religion destroys freedom?

Stretching westward from deep in the Appalachian Mountains to the waters of the Mississippi River that drain the center of the United States lies Kentucky, the Land of Tomorrow. Kentucky was the nation's first extension of itself into the interior of the vast North American continent. As such, Kentucky became the restless heart of the growing, maturing United States. To know Kentucky, its land, people, its civilization, its distinctive character and personality, takes time. Often, such things are not as they first seem. This is so for it is the state's numerous ironies and paradoxes that give the Commonwealth's way of life much of its meaning, power, vitality, wonder, and its great capacity to endure. The greatest of these ironies and paradoxes is that of the larger American civilization-the tension and ever shifting balance between the strong desire for expansive individual liberty and the need for community. This is the story of Kentucky, the nation's restless heart, and of its people's ongoing search for home and freedom, as seen through multiple prisms of irony and paradox.

Stretching westward from deep in the Appalachian Mountains to the waters of the Mississippi River that drain the center of the United States lies Kentucky, the Land of Tomorrow. Kentucky was the nation's first extension of itself into the interior of the vast North American continent. As such, Kentucky became the restless heart of the growing, maturing United States. To know Kentucky, its land, people, its civilization, its distinctive character and personality, takes time. Often, such things are not as they first seem. This is so for it is the state's numerous ironies and paradoxes that give the Commonwealth's way of life much of its meaning, power, vitality, wonder, and its great capacity to endure. The greatest of these ironies and paradoxes is that of the larger American civilization the tension and ever shifting balance between the strong desire for expansive individual liberty and the need for community. This is the story of Kentucky, the nation's restless heart, and of its people's ongoing search for home and freedom, as seen through multiple prisms of irony and paradox."