Brad Gregory

Associate Professor of Early
Modern  European History
University of Notre Dame

"The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society"


On Thursday, April 19, the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought hosted University of Notre Dame History Professor Brad Gregory for its third Annual Robert Louis Wilken Lecture.  Before a lively and inquisitive audience, Prof. Gregory discussed his newest book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard). This vibrant and important work of intellectual history offers a grand synthesis of the West over the past five centuries, challenging its readers and the St. Anselm Institute audience to inquire why so many elements of modern intellectual and moral life deviate so widely from the sincere commitments of Catholics, Protestants and others in the West. 

Professor Gregory's deftly employs a multiple case genealogical approach in his book--including one on the emergence of the modern research university--to recover the intellectual developments and shifting institutional terrains since the Reformation that sustain not only the contemporary hyperpluralism of religious and nonreligious beliefs, but our seeming incapacities to engage the common good or to explain why we can bemoan but are unable to move beyond the shallows of our instrumental commitments to consumerism and the therapeutic life.  For a video of this talk, click here.

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