Ross Douthat – författare

An Instant New York Times Bestseller"Truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century"--World magazineFrom the host of the Interesting Times podcastDo you ever wish you had more faith? Here is a blueprint for thinking your way from doubt to belief.As a columnist for the New York Times who writes often about spiritual topics for a skeptical audience, Ross Douthat understands that many of us want to have more faith than we do. Douthat argues that in light of what we know today it should be harder to not have faith than to have it.With empathy, clarity, and rigor, Douthat explores:Why nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us about the worldHow modern scientific developments make a religious worldview more credible, not lessWhy it's entirely reasonable to believe in mystical and supernatural realitiesHow an open-minded religious quest should proceed amid the diversity of religious faithsHow Douthat's own Christianity is informed by his blueprint for belief With clear and straightforward arguments, Believe shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural. Highly relevant for our current moment, Believe offers a pathway for thinking your way from doubt into belief, from uncertainty about our place in the universe into a confidence that we are here for a reason.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

"Truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century"--World magazine

From the host of the Interesting Times podcast

Do you ever wish you had more faith? Here is a blueprint for thinking your way from doubt to belief.

As a columnist for the New York Times who writes often about spiritual topics for a skeptical audience, Ross Douthat understands that many of us want to have more faith than we do. Douthat argues that in light of what we know today it should be harder to not have faith than to have it.

With empathy, clarity, and rigor, Douthat explores:

Why nonbelief requires ignoring what our reasoning faculties tell us about the worldHow modern scientific developments make a religious worldview more credible, not lessWhy it''s entirely reasonable to believe in mystical and supernatural realitiesHow an open-minded religious quest should proceed amid the diversity of religious faithsHow Douthat''s own Christianity is informed by his blueprint for belief

 

With clear and straightforward arguments, Believe shows how religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmos and our place within it, illuminates the mystery of consciousness, and explains the persistent reality of encounters with the supernatural. Highly relevant for our current moment, Believe offers a pathway for thinking your way from doubt into belief, from uncertainty about our place in the universe into a confidence that we are here for a reason.

In a provocative challenge to Republican conventional wisdom, two of the Right''s rising young thinkers call upon the GOP to focus on the interests and needs of working-class voters.Grand New Party lays bare the failures of the conservative revolution and presents a detailed blueprint for building the next Republican majority. Blending history, analysis, and fresh, often controversial recommendations, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argue that it is time to move beyond the Reagan legacy and the current Republican power structure. With specific proposals covering such hot-button topics as immigration, health care, and taxes, Grand New Party shakes up the Right, challenges the Left, and confronts the changing political landscape.From the Trade Paperback edition.

In an age of distraction, this issue of Plough Quarterly looks at inwardness – how sustainable human community and social activism must be rooted in the spiritual life.How much of your day is spent in reality, and how much in a fake world? We’ve learned that screen time is bad for you, too much media consumption damages your heart, and Facebook can make you mentally ill. We’re aware of the mind-altering power of advertising, the dehumanizing passions of our polarized politics, and the fact that millions of us have learned to multitask while watching footage of refugees drowning.But what are we to do about it? If this fake world is invading our souls, it’s in our souls that we must find the cure. Only a return to inwardness can bring distracted moderns back to Jesus and to constructive work for his kingdom.Here activists may object: Isn’t it the height of selfishness to retreat into our interior life when we ought to be out saving starving children? Yet Christians through the ages have insisted that inwardness is crucial to the life of discipleship. It’s what keeps us from falling for demagogues and false gospels, from wasting life on superficialities, and from ignoring our neighbor. In fact, throughout history it has often been the mystics who were most active in serving others. In true Plough fashion, this issue brings together a colorful cast of examples: from medieval Beguines and Benedictines to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Simone Weil, and Fannie Lou Hamer, to contemporary voices like Robert Cardinal Sarah, Johann Christoph Arnold, and three persecuted Syrian priests. These lives offer us glimpses of the real world from which our fake world seeks to distract us, and can guide us in our own refusal to conform.Also in this issue:• Poetry from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Malcolm Guite• Insights on inwardness from Meister Eckhart, Eberhard Arnold, Marguerite Porete, Simone Weil, and Isaac Penington• A forum on the Benedict Option with Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat, Jacqueline C. Rivers, and Randall Gauger• Artwork by Jason Landsel, Bruce Herman, Jane Chapin, Graham Berry, Fra Angelico, Francisco de Zurbarán, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Matthew J. Cutter, John August Swanson, Vittorio Matteo Corcos, and Leon DaboPlough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails—and why it threatens to take American society with it. Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual roots of the nation’s political and economic crises. He argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it’s bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses. These faiths speak from many pulpits—conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably “spiritual”—and many of their preachers claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity—not the real thing. Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption. In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he brilliantly charts institutional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith—which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the civil rights movement—through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich,” a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline. His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our wealthy, successful society has passed into an age of gridlock, stalemate, public failure and private despair. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

A New York Times columnist and one of America’s leading conservative thinkers considers Pope Francis’s efforts to change the church he governs in a book that is “must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of the West and the future of global Christianity” (Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option).Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, today Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Church, while perceived as a revelation by many, has provoked division throughout the world. “If a conclave were to be held today,” one Roman source told The New Yorker, “Francis would be lucky to get ten votes.” In his “concise, rhetorically agile…adroit, perceptive, gripping account (The New York Times Book Review), Ross Douthat explains why the particular debate Francis has opened—over communion for the divorced and the remarried—is so dangerous: How it cuts to the heart of the larger argument over how Christianity should respond to the sexual revolution and modernity itself, how it promises or threatens to separate the church from its own deep past, and how it divides Catholicism along geographical and cultural lines. Douthat argues that the Francis era is a crucial experiment for all of Western civilization, which is facing resurgent external enemies (from ISIS to Putin) even as it struggles with its own internal divisions, its decadence, and self-doubt. Whether Francis or his critics are right won’t just determine whether he ends up as a hero or a tragic figure for Catholics. It will determine whether he’s a hero, or a gambler who’s betraying both his church and his civilization into the hands of its enemies. “A balanced look at the struggle for the future of Catholicism…To Change the Church is a fascinating look at the church under Pope Francis” (Kirkus Reviews). Engaging and provocative, this is “a pot-boiler of a history that examines a growing ecclesial crisis” (Washington Independent Review of Books).

Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not.The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness – the virtuous citizen was “beautiful and good.” It’s an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics.Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear’s hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries’ antidiscrimination laws.But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society’s avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care?On this theme: - Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child’s life.- Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability.- Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things.- Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities.- Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights.- Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was a disability.- Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern.- Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice.Also in the issue: - Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease.- Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall.- Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father’s.- Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn.- Christian Wiman pens three new poems.- Susannah Black profiles Flannery O’Conner.- Our writers review Eyal Press’s Dirty Work, Steve Coll’s Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our wealthy, successful society has passed into an age of gridlock, stalemate, public failure, and private despair. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

Este libro se dirige a su audiencia escéptica pero deseosa de contenidos espirituales. Muchos quieren tener más fe, y Douthat argumenta que, a la luz de lo que ya sabemos, es más difícil no creer.Porque no creer no exige ignorar lo que nuestro razonamiento nos dice sobre el mundo. Porque el enorme desarrollo científico moderno hace aún más creíble una visión religiosa del mundo. Porque es totalmente razonable creer en realidades místicas y sobrenaturales. Porque una mente abierta busca certezas también en este ámbito. Porque la creencia religiosa da sentido al orden del cosmos y a nuestro lugar dentro de él, ilumina el misterio de la conciencia y explica la persistente realidad de tantos encuentros con lo sobrenatural.CREER ofrece un camino desde la duda hasta la creencia, desde la incertidumbre sobre nuestro lugar en el universo hasta la confianza de que estamos aquí por una razón.

A powerful portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control from the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion.The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,” a civilizational malaise that could endure for longer than we think.Ranging from the chaos of Trump-era Washington to the gridlock of the European Union; from our empty cradles to our lonely pathways through middle and old age; from the lost promise of the Space Age and early internet to today’s earthbound surveillance state; from the recycling of Baby Boomer pop culture to the Brave New World we’re making with drugs and virtual reality escapes, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern condition – how we got here, how long our malaise might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.