The reality of the secular has come to obsess modern religious thinkers, notes Martin E. Marty. This volume analyzes from the first time the complex story of THE MODERN SCHISM, an episode in the cultural and spiritual history of the West which has had fateful consequences for contemporary society.Dr. Marty argues that during the previous century, there occurred a cluster of events more devastating to--and potentially more hopeful for--Christianity than anything that happened during such similar periods as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. He traces three different types of secularization which together make up the "modern schism," shows how they have developed in the West, and where they are leading man today.By contrasting the ways in which the old Christian order was attacked in Europe, ignored in England, and transformed in America, the author points to present alternatives to that order and what they mean for society.

Martin E. Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where for 35 years he taught religious history in three faculties. Since 1956 he has been on the masthead ofThe Christian Century and is editor ofContext. He specializes in American religious history and headed the six-year "Fundamentalism Project" of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds the National Medal of Humanities and the medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was honored with the National Book Award forRighteous Empire in 1971. An ordained Lutheran minister, he frequently also writes on theological themes.