Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) has been widely praised as one of the most important Catholic historians of the twentieth century. Commended for his sophisticated approach to history, Dawson focused much of his writing on the important relationship between religion and culture. This volume is the first edited collection of Dawson’s works to appear in several decades. It includes the full text of The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (1960) and features selections from numerous works, including The Making of Europe (1932), The Judgment of the Nations (1943), and Medieval Essays (1959).

“Superbly introduced and shrewdly chosen, this selection of hard-to-find Dawson essays is a powerful contribution. It covers all the central themes of this greatest of all historians of Christian cultures.”—Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute

“No one was more keenly aware than Christopher Dawson of the need to recover a sense of Western history—and Christianity’s centrality to that history—in order to understand the modern world in which we live. Russello’s selections from Dawson provide a marvelous introduction to the thought of an unjustly neglected twentieth-century giant. A great book that I hope will lead to the republication of all of Dawson.”—Robert Royal, Ethics and Public Policy Center

“A profound collection of essays from the vast corpus of Dawson studies. . . . Dawson remains an essential teacher about the content of the modern mind and whence it came. His judgments about man’s worldly and transcendent meaning are always on the mark.”—James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University

Gerald J. Russello, an attorney, served as law clerk to Judge Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for the 1998-1999 term.