In this July 2025 lecture, Heidi White leads her listeners through a series of questions regarding modernity: What is it? What does it do? And what is it for? At its heart, she says, the modern project is a technical endeavor driven by a belief in “progress” that results in the abolition of man. White contrasts characteristics of Christendom with those of modernity, showing how the latter is an inversion of the former. For example, while Christendom sees the cosmos as meaningful, hierarchical, communal, sacramental, rationally knowable, and eschatological, modernity’s view of the universe is materialistic, egalitarian, individual, utilitarian, nihilistic, progressive, and focused only on the immanent realm. White acknowledges the dynamism of modernity and the actual goods it has brought us but argues that its mechanized, progressive vision of human flourishing has failed on its own terms. She connects modernity’s “will to power” with Sauron in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, revealing its diabolical and nihilistic nature. Our response, White argues, must be to become culture builders and keepers grounded in humility and an ethic of love. We must allow ourselves to be transformed to be like Christ — and, like Tolkien’s hobbits, to cultivate the goodness of an ordinary life lived at a human scale. This, she says, is what it means to build a life worth saving.
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