KING OF THE CASTLE – Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World

This marvellous, beautifully written book, which abounds with penetrating insights, is concerned with the most vital and crucial questions now agitating human life and closely examines many of the unquestioned assumptions by which we live our lives, comparing them with the beliefs that have shaped and guided human life in the past. Considers how secular societies attempt to possess their citizens, body and soul, and how, as a consequence, the necessity of redefining human responsibility becomes an ever more urgent imperative. Presents the traditional view of man as ‘God’s Viceroy on earth’, with an eye to its practical implications in a world that has all but forgotten, under the pressure of mass social persuasion, that man must always be free to choose his own ultimate destiny. The author’s thesis is a passionate yet incisive plea for the restoration of the sacred norms of religion, as against the debilitating and falsifying aims of a profane world-view based on no more than recent scientific and technological achievements. It offers a taste of theology, of history, of aesthetics and of eschatology blended in such a way as to provide a whole and balanced image.

***
“This is an urgent piece of writing, a reading of “what and where we are.” –Times Library Supplement
***
“How much sharper is his call for ecological respect than our current pragmatic codes of conservation?” –Guardian