Article: History and meaning.(The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought)(Book review)

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, by Marilynne Robinson; Picador, 2005, US$14.

I KNOW THAT SOME READERS will share with me an ill-defined unease about modernity. Unfortunately, as we grow older, it becomes more difficult to decide whether our general mood of dissatisfaction with the zeitgeist is simply a nostalgic longing for a fondly remembered past--laudator temporis acti--or whether, indeed, things really have deteriorated. Is there some benchmark or set of values that can be used to measure the health of a civilisation such that we can ground our concern on something other than vague feelings? I doubt that any unambiguous analysis is available to ...

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