Overview: In this genre defying book, author Sean McGrath explains why we must look more closely at our secular society’s religious roots to counteract the destructive spiritual forces consumerism has unleashed on the Earth.

Verdict: Modernity, the author argues, is a Christian heresy. It can only be corrected through a religious conversion of Christians, post-Christians, and their children. What must be recovered is Christianity’s contemplative and mystical attitude - but it must be recovered in a non-nostalgic way that moves forward into the ecological civilization that is coming to painful birth in our time.

The Lost Road: A Search for the Soul of the West by author Sean McGrath is, in part, an autobiographical narrative that recounts a life-long search for contemplative Christianity, as well as an ongoing interrogation into why it’s so difficult to find, sustain, and share.

The book opens on an autobiographical road map of just how McGrath found the road, taking us back to when he was just twenty years old, and having taken a semester off school, subsequently began his travels. Shelving his books, and buying a sturdy pair of Italian hiking boots, he added a backpack and bought himself a plane ticker to India. It was 1987.

We then continue onward with him as becomes a person in the initial, probationary stage of joining a monastery, undergoing intensive spiritual training, prayer, and work to discern their calling before taking formal vows, before, and after a series of other dutiful callings along his spiritually bountiful journey, landing on becoming a professional academic.

The second half of his prose brings with it a most dedicated, expertly sculpted and magnificently-hued outline and representation of the decline of Western religion and its incorporated and inclusive cultures; whilst at the same time proffering a possible road out, and toward a better, less self-serving, nihilistic future.

About the Author - Sean McGrath is a Full Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at McGill University. After five years in a cloistered Roman Catholic monastic community, he completed doctoral degrees in both Philosophy and Theology.

He has taught and researched the philosophy of religion for over twenty years. He is the author of six academically acclaimed books in areas as diverse as psychoanalysis and ecology, but always with a contemplative theological approach. He lives in Holyrood, Canada.

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