Christianity for Modern Pagans: PASCAL’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained

Review by Trent Dougherty for Christianity for Modern Pagans: PASCAL’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained
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On the one hand, the text of the Pensees can be hard for beginners, even smart ones. On the other hand, textbooks where people tell you what other people thought suck. So Kreeft gives you the main dish, the text of the Pensees itself (nicely categorized topically, rather than the normal rather random fashion), but with his lucid notes interspersed along with helpful illustrations. Pascal is utterly fascinating, you’ve never read anything like it. It’s so mind-blowing at times, it’s nice to be accompanied by Kreeft.

Review by some guy for Christianity for Modern Pagans: PASCAL’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained
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Kreefts book helps put Pascals idea into their proper context. The good stuff from the Pensees is all in here. Pascal is truly a great thinker not to be missed.

Review by Kevin Davis for Christianity for Modern Pagans: PASCAL’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained
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Dr. Peter Kreeft (Philosopher at Boston College) has created another masterpiece to add to his exstensive list of orthodox Christian philosophy, theology, and apologetics books. Kreeft, along with Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, John Polkinghorne, N. T. Wright, and others, are defending the Christian faith with great intellectual rigour following in the traditions of Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, Chesterton, and Lewis.In this particular work, Kreeft takes Pascal’s Pensees (which he deems as the greatest work in apologetics), edits, outlines, and explains them with much focus on the modern world that was just beginning in Pascal’s day (17th century) and has culminated in our “late modern” world of atheism, nihilism, existentialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, neo-Marxism, and, in general, confussion.I thought it would be helpful to give a rather random example of how Kreeft takes one of the Pensees and expounds on it:Pascal: Nothing presented to the soul is simple, and the soul never applies itself simply to any subject. That is why the same thing makes us laugh and cry.
Kreeft: This is why life is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a tragicomedy. If we do not both laugh and cry at life, we do not understand it. …People are never simple. They are good-and-evil, happy-and-wretched. We are also flesh-and-spirit. God is not simply either. He is one-and-three, person-and-nature, just-and-merciful, eternal-and-dynamic, transcendent-and-immanent. Only abstractions are simple. The only language with no ambiguity, no analogy and no poetry is mathematics. That’s why it’s the only language computers can “understand”: it doesn’t require understanding at all.That shouldn’t be thought to represent the whole of the book (that also deals with more analytical arguments), which covers a wide variety of issues dealing with the validity of the Christian faith. As Kreeft said, the Pensees should be required reading for all students of Western Philosophy/Theology and particularly the Christian. Also, check-out his other works, especially the surprisingly good Handbook of Christian Apologetics, a sort-of summa apologetica. If you want a good foundation in Christianity, Lewis’ Mere Christianity and Chesterton’s Orthodoxy are essential even to the life-long Christian.