Utopia for Our Century

David Albertson is professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is the author of, most recently, The Geometry of Christian Contemplation: Measure without Measure. Jason Blakely is professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author most recently of Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life.

“At a particularly dark moment in political and cultural history, Utopia for Our Century is a marvelous call to sanity and charity, to a morally imaginative vision of society, and to the possibility of truly seeing the future in the light of eternal hopes.”—David Bentley Hart, author of All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life“Utopia for Our Century is an ambitious book that champions the cause of hope against deep currents of despair, arriving just as faith in the American project seems to be rapidly disintegrating. But Albertson and Blakely have much more on their minds than political analysis. Their insight is that dreams of the future arrive not in carefully plotted programs but as gleaming fragments of hope illuminating the possibility that we already contain the keys to a flourishing future inside ourselves, in the shape of worlds to come.”—Elizabeth Bruenig, staff writer, The Atlantic“Passionate, erudite, and evocative, this book is a welcome and urgent contribution to contemporary political thinking. In these malicious times, when cruelty and swindle and ignorance constitute official policy, we need utopia more than ever.”—Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University“Clear lines are usually drawn between utopian and realistic socialism, and between Utopia and the Kingdom of God. But Thomas More explodes these suppositions, as this brilliant book so lucidly demonstrates. Its authors point the way beyond ‘progress’ and ‘realism’ towards the irrepressible hope for virtuous community here on earth, already within human time.”—John Milbank, professor emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham