The Moral Amnesia of Modernity: The Scholarship of Ernest Fortin

Extract

Walking in Ernest Fortin's scholarly universe is a great pleasure. One breathes an atmosphere of serenity, good sense, and profound erudition. Fortin is at once highly serious yet often amusing; he is both learned and unpretentious; he is frequently skeptical but never unpleasant or destructive. The traveler in his universe encounters not only a great number of interesting discussions but also particularly brilliant pieces, such as “The Bible Made Me Do It: Christianity, Science, and the Environment,” where the author fully exposes the absurdity of the claim that Genesis 1, in which God grants humanity dominion over the rest of creation, bears responsibility for the damage done in recent times to the physical environment. In bringing together the essays and reviews that make up these volumes, Brian Benestad has performed an important service not only for the community of Christian scholars and thinkers but for all who are interested in the history of philosophy and political theory.