Religion and
Innovation in Human Affairs
Grant Recipients
Religion
and Innovation:
Naturalism, Scientific
Progress, and
Secularization The Salvation
of the Nations: Sacred
and Secular Narratives
of Progress in the
Postwar West
Award
Amount: $100,000 PI:
Christopher Shannon Sponsoring
Institution:
Christendom College
The Project will
reexamine mid-twentieth
century American and
European social thought
in light of
contemporaneous
developments in Catholic
theology. In the decades
following the end of
World War II,
intellectual life was
profoundly shaped by the
ideological battles of
the Cold War. Mainstream
intellectual histories
of this period have
focused on the battle
between liberalism and
Marxism to the near
exclusion of
theologically informed
social philosophy. Among
secular and religious
thinkers in the West, a
common opposition to
communist tyranny often
obscured radically
different understandings
of the nature of human
freedom. Secular liberal
thinkers tended to see
the Cold War as a
struggle to secure the
material and cultural
achievements of
modernity in the West
and extend them to the
rest of the world.
Catholic intellectuals
such as Romano Guardini,
Henri de Lubac,
Christopher Dawson, and
Jean Daniélou
took a more critical
stance toward modernity.
The carnage of World War
II and the Holocaust
struck these Catholic
thinkers as the logical
consequence of a
philosophical
materialism and atheism
shared by secular
intellectuals of the
democratic West and the
communist East alike. At
the same time, these
thinkers also rejected
the often facile,
anti-modern medievalism
that had limited earlier
generations of Catholic
intellectuals in their
response to modernity.
In the process of
crafting a distinctly
Catholic understanding
of historical change and
cultural relativity,
these thinkers perceived
that each age is
different and requires a
unique, innovative
response on the part of
the Church. True
progress, then, involves
working through the
challenges particular to
each age while remaining
faithful to the
teachings of the Church.
The chief outcome of the
Project will be a
book-length scholarly
manuscript suitable for
publication by a
university press.
Christopher
Shannon is
associate professor of
history at Christendom
College. He has written
a number of books
dealing with aspects of
American intellectual
and cultural history. In
the last decade, he has
published several
articles and essays
defending the notion of
a Catholic approach to
history—most recently,
“From Histories to
Traditions: A New
Paradigm for Pluralism
in the Study of the
Past” (Historically
Speaking,
January 2011), which won
the Jack Miller Center
Prize in Intellectual
History, administered by
the Historical Society.
Christendom
College. He has written
a number of books
dealing with aspects of
American intellectual
and cultural history. In
the last decade, he has
published several
articles and essays
defending the notion of
a Catholic approach to
history—most recently,
“From Histories to
Traditions: A New
Paradigm for Pluralism
in the Study of the
Past” (
