Showing results for "América" in Consciousness & Thought

In 1968, at the climax of the '60s, Os Guinness visited the United States for the first time. There he was struck by an impression he’d already felt in England and elsewhere: Beneath all the idealism and struggle for freedom was a growing disillusionment and loss of meaning. “Underneath the efforts of a generation”, he wrote, “lay dust”. Even more troubling, Christians seemed uninformed about the cultural shifts and ill-equipped to respond. Guinness took on these concerns by writing his first book, The Dust of Death.

This addition to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether it is the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.

We are face to face with this great world, and our relations to it are manifold. One of these is the necessity we have to live, to till the soil, to gather food, to clothe ourselves, to get materials from nature. We are always making things that will satisfy our needs, always in touch with this great world through hunger and thirst. Then, we have our mind; and our mind seeks its own food. It must find out reason in things, faced with a multiplicity of facts, and bewildered when it cannot find one unifying principle which simplifies the heterogeneity of things.