I first read these essays while a senior at college. Now, about twenty years later, I reread them in a study on the English poet TS Eliot. Eliot uses language very carefully, as any poet should, but he is a poet approaching the world of an anthropologist. Further, he writes in an era (pre- and post-World-War-II) in which European culture was pulled apart at the seams and remade again.
Eliot himself is an American transplant in England. He was largely self-educated, though he studied at Harvard and Oxford. He converted to Anglicanism from a vague Unitarian background. He writes about Christianity as the glue that stands behind European and Western culture.
Eliot appreciates pluralism and diversity. He states just such in his first essay. He sees (correctly) that Christianity consists of a diverse culture which is interested in many things: especially in the education of both youths and adults and broadly in the worlds of the state, society, and the arts.
One cannot help but wonder what Eliot would think about today’s increasingly pluralist world whose composition extends beyond Christianity into Islam, agnosticism, atheism, and other faiths. The future of the West seems more like India than Rome. Was Eliot merely one of the last gasps of Christianity or does he have something unique to contribute to our discussion?
These themes are why I picked up this book again. I let my subconscious process his insights framed in history and set in a beautiful use of the English language. As always happens with these difficult and broad topics, I came to no definite conclusions. Nonetheless, upon concluding the book, I feel as if I have traversed these topics just a little bit more. Many talk about these issues, but few do so with as cultured and definite a voice as Eliot. That’s why it’s well worth the time to read him.
Christianity and Culture
by T.S. Eliot
Copyright (c)1948, 1939
ISBN13 9780156177351
Page Count: 202
Genre: Essays, Religion, Anthropology
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