Peter D. Beaulieu examines the challenge posed by-and to-modernity and historic Islam as they encounter one another. He compares the Western separation of Church and state with the unitary Islamic State, and explores the proposed cultural and societal principles of the Second Vatican Council as potentially influencing long-term events in both arenas. Beaulieu's research is comprehensive and richly documented, yet offers an accessible triangular inquiry into the mosque, the manger, and modernity. By restoring a place at the table for Trinitarian Christianity alongside the engulfing monotheism of Islam and the alternative skepticism of Western rationalism, this inquiry broadens the pallet of inter-religious and intercultural contact points. Beyond Secularism and Jihad? provides balanced attention to the differences as well as the similarities between Christianity, Islam, and modernity. An emerging theme is natural law, which is universal and intrinsic to all mankind and not confined to competing theologies. Neglected in the West that it helped create, natural law might contribute to the needed "grammar" for dialogue between the citizens in the West and the followers of Islam.

A Generation Abandoned explores the disruptive cultural events especially of the past half century as these have undermined the confidence of the young in themselves and in civil society, and finally in our place in the universe. The overall theme is the contrast between this sense of abandonment and our inborn and neglected orientation toward personal worth and the common good (the natural law). Much of what is peddled as "social evolution" today is shown to be a throwback to darker times. The analysis submits to a refreshingly conversational tone, but also draws incisively from a very broad pallet of history, literature, theater, theology, and simplifying and illuminating anecdotes (some of them first hand). An early chapter outlines the "perfect storm" of the 1960s. Later chapters expose the word games of the cultural elite, the saga of the family through history and now its abrupt erosion, and the difference between any meandering "arc of history" and a more grounded arc of relations-our rationalized "culture of death" versus a flourishing "human ecology."