He focuses in particular on the cult of progress that has risen as the golden calf of a neo-pagan culture, dissecting with dexterity the irony of a culture that latched onto the concept of progress because of Christianity now using the concept as a means to squelch, in particular via “laundered words and empty slogans” its core beliefs and to humiliate its adherents. He surveys post-Christian modernity with a cool-eyed clarity - from the replacement of belief in society with “pragmatism and desire” to the corruption of science to the grip of consumerism and the corresponding rise of the throwaway culture to the breakdown of the family and its resultant destruction of the entire “cultural ecology” that once sustained a healthy society. It is Archbishop Chaput’s diagnosis of the advanced state of this spiritual decay that is one of the book’s greatest contributions. It points us beyond this life, but also seeks to remake the world in holiness.” Not only are we called to be happy saints in our day, he argues, but society needs the presence of active Christian witness, fully alive with the “freshness and fragrance of the Gospel,” to quote the Holy Father, or else society begins to whither. “Christianity,” he writes, “is a restless faith. The book, drawing heavily from Christian thinkers both early and modern, makes the undeniable case that this task is written into the very nature of Christianity. Most recently, the Archbishop documents clearly, it is Christians who stand in the path of the hurtling course of anything given the label “social progress.” And while the instinct to withdraw from a culture intent on snuffing out the very Christian values that built it up from the foundations is understandably real, “Our task as Christians,” he writes, “is to be healthy cells in society.” But his book speaks beyond the streets of Philly all the way to into the corners of the broader culture, where the traditional family structure is imploding, the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution is still ravaging, new dogmas of gender identity and hyper-individualism are emerging, and Americans are increasingly beholden to the “idolatry of progress,” which, stripped of any Christian meaning, is a wayward monster that devours anything in its trajectory. As the head of one of America’s grittiest and most urban dioceses, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Archbishop Chaput is an authoritative voice weighing into this debate.

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