A history of Western civilization's rise to global dominance offers insight into the development of such concepts as competition, modern medicine, and the work ethic, arguing that Western dominance is being lost to cultures who are more productively utilizing Western techniques.

Francis Schaeffer's Classic Analysis of the Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture Civilizations throughout history have built societies around their own limited value systems including rulers, finite gods, or relativism-only to fail. The absence of a Christian foundation eventually leads to breakdown, and those signs are visible in present-day culture as well. Can modern society avoid the same fate? In this latest edition of How Should We...

"A brilliantly written, deeply thoughtful, and even humorous book about a very dark topic. I hope civilization will last long enough for it to be published for all to enjoy and contemplate."--Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Written with clarity, tenacity, humor, and warmth, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events-and the real possibility of...

Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, The Passion of the Western Mind is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts...

A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of an historical development begun in the second millennium BC in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established...

In the hysteria surrounding Political Islam, it is difficult to find analysis that doesn't justify the existence of Islamic leaders or react to the West's fear of 'extremists'. In Islamic Activists, Deina Ali Abdelkader shows us what Islamic leaders and activists believe and what they think about just governance. Explaining and comparing Islamist ideas, including those about leadership, justice and minority rights, Abdelkader explains how these...

"In How the World Made the West, Oxford historian and classicist Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the "civilizational" thinking regarding the origins of Western culture and thought-that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Upending two centuries of conventional historiography and troubling the waters of our Western origin story, she locates the roots of the West in everything...

"Teofilo F. Ruiz, Winner of the 2011 National Humanities Medal" Teofilo F. Ruiz is Distinguished Professor of History and of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. His many books include Spain's Centuries of Crisis and From Heaven to Earth. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and selected as one of UCLA's Distinguished Teachers. A reflection on the diverse ways Western humanity has attempted to escape its frightening history This book reflects...

"A book on how Western nations are often blamed for history's atrocities, while all nations have tarnished histories. This is a thorough argument in the defense of Western values and history"-- Provided by publisher.