Reason’s Culture, Life’s Defense by Jack Wade Nowlin

Reason’s Culture, Life’s Defense

The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis
by Robert P. George
Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2001
(387 pages; $24.95, cloth)

reviewed by Jack Wade Nowlin

The striking image on the cover of Robert P. George’s The Clash of Orthodoxies shows the stately dome of a cathedral standing above a harrowing scene of billowing black smoke, fire, and ruins. It is a photograph of St. Paul’s Cathedral taken during a Nazi bombing of London, a representative scene from one of the last century’s great clashes of orthodoxies: Man made in the image of God, possessing intrinsic dignity and worth, versus the Übermensch, “blood and soil,” and the Nietzschean will to power.