Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

At 116 short pages, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, written by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, is one of those books you could just scream through in a day or two, which is what I did. It's a highly rewarding read with plenty of valuable insights and eye-opening observations about faith, morality, the human person, reason, etc.

One of the running themes of the book is the proposition known as Pascal's Wager. Ratzinger observes that in a declining Western culture, the solution that could save it is his proposition that society live as if God did exist, even if evidence may not satisfy the Enlightenment rationalist philosophy which dominates today.

And this is the interesting take on Pascal's Wager that had never occurred to me before. I had always thought of Pascal's Wager as a way of living with the afterlife in mind: that just in case there is a God who will actually care about whether we place our faith in him, we had better do so in order that we might go to heaven. But Benedict's application of Pascal's Wager has little to do with the last things. His proposition is surprisingly practical: that it be applied not (just) in order to sure up a reward in the hereafter, but in order to keep the household of mankind on earth from collapsing.

These and other insights abound in Ratzinger's tome, and its easily readable in a single weekend. Check it out.