Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism, and the Myth of Decadence

This book about nostalgia raises the question of why it has become such a dominant and influential posture in contemporary philosophical and theological writing. The author notes the presence of the word "after" in a great many contemporary academic titles, and notes a spiritual sort of alienation that many feel in the "modern age." Out of this scholarly discontent emerges one of two related attempts: the attempt to return to a pre-modern manner of thinking and being (nostalgia); and the playful flight into some vaguely defined "postmodernity" (utopia). In either case, the common perception is that modernity is a problem, a problem to be avoided or escaped.

Bringing philosophical and theological texts into conversation with one another, the book discovers a startling similarity in the accounts of modernness offered in these disparate idioms. Both are telling a story--a story which, the author argues, is as seductive as it is misguided.