"Michael Allen Gillespie reveals that modernity is much less secular than conventional wisdom suggests. Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life - and that they did so not out of hostility but in order to sustain certain religious beliefs." "We are still trying, Gillespie contends, to resolve the tensions in our ideas of God, man, and nature that arose in the late Middle Ages as a result of the struggle between contradictory elements within Christianity. In the end, he shows that understanding modernity's continuing entanglement with Christian metaphysics is crucial to comprehending the hidden possibilities of our confrontation with radical Islam and with the dualistic elements of our own tradition."--BOOK JACKET.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [295]-361) and index.