Restoring Humanity: Essays on the Evangelization of Culture

by R. Jared Staudt, Edward Sri (Foreword)

Restoring Humanity weaves together a many-colored coat of cultural evangelization, centering on how the Christian faith renews all aspects of human life. The book lays out a vision of history and culture that flows from the Incarnation as a ground for a sacramental reality. In turn, the human person, who searches for tangible meaning, is torn by the tension between beauty and vanity, even as fallen humanity seeks redemption in the beauty of Christ. From these general principles, the book examines foundational elements of culture in the land, family life, and education. Land grounds the primordial cultural mission given to Adam and Eve and plays a crucial role in salvation history. The home serves as a central place to build a coherent Christian culture through familial prayer, work, leisure, and mission. Education builds upon the family’s primordial role by forming the mind in a coherent vision of life, as well as developing habits that will leaven the wider world. Finally, the Church seeks to renew all of society by restoring faith to its central and unifying role, which it accomplishes by engaging in the New Evangelization that St. John Paul II linked directly to the renewal of culture. R. Jared Staudt, PhD serves as the Director of Formation for the Archdiocese of Denver and as Visiting Associate Professor at the Augustine Institute. He earned his undergraduate and master's degrees in Catholic Studies from the University of St. Thomas and his doctorate in systematic theology from Ave Maria University. He is the author of the The What Every Catholic Should Know (forthcoming) and The Beer Brewing a Catholic Culture Yesterday & Today, as well as the editor of The University and the Church; Don J. Briel's Essays on Education. He and his wife, Anne, have six children and he is a Benedictine oblate.

203 pages, Paperback

Published June 14, 2020

Reviews

[Tim R · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of impressive breadth and depth, pulling together the thought of Catholic philosophers and theologians on many facets of the topic of faith and culture. I took a lot of notes while reading and got a lot out of it. However the book is seriously flawed in the failure of its editor to catch multiple typos and other copy editing errors. It seemed there was a new one every three pages: a stray word that should have been deleted, a missing word that should have been typed. Staudt also has a tendency to use a block quote and then basically restate the content of the quotation, without adding insight and oftentimes in more opaque prose than the original quotation. Again I see this as a failure of the editor. This could be a clearer and cleaner work. Nevertheless, the research and synthesis are valuable. I think my favorite chapter was on family culture, and how the family needs to move from being the object of catechesis to the subject (or protagonist) of catechesis, which is Staudt’s wonderful way of expressing a paradigm that can transform the way we view our own family lives.