Critical Times for America: The Politics of Cultural Amnesia (Westar Studies)

Human societies live and breathe through their myths. A myth is not a simple story; it is the complex social reasoning of a people, a way of making sense of the world. Burton Mack calls this reasoning ""social logic,"" and as a master of ancient Rome and the rise of Christianity, he knows that the Western experience has been embedded in the Christian myth as its ""big picture"" narrative. But what happens when the big picture becomes fragmented and when an old myth loses its ability to function in a new world order? Mack is convinced that at the heart of contemporary political crises lies the need to create a new myth beyond the grand narratives and lingering fragments history has given us. Mack invites his reader to think historically about the present, and imaginatively about the future, in this important book about ourselves.