World Without Heroes, A
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“”"A book the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century: a genuine moral/cultural
essay. And what George Roche has to say is not only profoundly true, it is thoroughly energizing and
inspiring.”"Midge Decter, Executive Director, The Committee for the Free World
“”A World Without Heroes is a trumpet call for constructive engagement in the social crisis by those
who refuse to discard the wisdom of the ages in a time of civilizational turmoil. Well written, cognitively
sturdy; it champions truth and the good in a transitory time when relativism tightens its stranglehold on the
inherited values of the past.”"Carl F.H. Henry, Founding Editor, Christianity Today
An elegant essay recalling the tradition of Chesterton, Lewis, Merton and Muggeridge, George Roche’s
A World Without Heroes harshly rebukes secular humanism as the most dehumanizing force of our
modern age. This ringing defense of Christianity, humorous, insightful and uncompromising, takes careful
and timeless aim at those ideas which have shriveled the will of the West and the faith of millions.
Marxism, Dadaism, Aesthetism, Empiricismthe author identifies these as the intellectual hallmarks of the
anti-heroic vision which threatens to dominate the West. We live, he says, in a world without heroes, a world
which rarely challenges evolution as the “”origin”" of all life and where natural selection is sold to the public as
if it were our only hope of salvation. Even the faithful are loathe to challenge these ideas, living as they are in
an era enervated by materialism in which to be a high-profile Christian means being stereotyped as narrow-minded,
unenlightened and, worst of all, “”unscientific.”"
But Roche denies the anti-heroic vision: life did not, he asserts, simply evolve from dead matter; to believe in
evolution without a divine intercessor itself is an act of faith. We cannot, says Roche, deduce a Mother Teresa
from the processes of natural selection. Human goodness testifies that man is not merely a beast distinguishable
from other species only by his higher intelligence. Moreover, he charges, there is a particular brand of science
which has been elevated to a religion. Science with a capital “”S”", pulling off the greatest hoax of all time by
investing itself with an aura of objectivity it does not possess.
The product of careful scholarship and a lifetime of earnest reflection, A World Without Heroes presents a
broad and penetrating history of four centuries of cultural, intellectual, scientific, and Christian thought.”