Letters to My Son

After forty years of theological, historical, and scriptural study, Vivienne E. Perkins, PhD, came to a unique conclusion: that man's entry into the modern and postmodern ages-facilitated by the superficial thought of the Enlightenment philosophes-undermined the traditional Christian understanding of human sin in relation to the God who created and sustains the universe. This path had been blazed before her by the great Russian philosopher, Lev Shestov, and by the French Reformed Christian author of forty books on technology (as well as the Gospel), Jacques Ellul.

Believing that the evil effects of Enlightenment thinking pose an unrecognized obstacle to her contemporaries' realizing the absolute necessity of a scriptural understanding of Christ's role in saving man from his overwhelming social and personal sin-which is now destroying the only planet upon which man can build a future-Dr. Perkins is determined to live her faith by adopting Daniel as her son and laying out a clear explanation of Western civilization's wrong turns during the last 250 years. Modern man, this author believes, is so absorbed in worshiping his supposed technological "progress" that he does not yet see what Shestov, Mumford, Lyotard, Ellul, and other serious thinkers have seen-that we misunderstand the real essence of progress and that the unrestrained technological "progress" we admire so much cannot give us a human future on a healthy planet. Climate catastrophe looms, and we are now facing a situation in which to repent (to change) is our only option.