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Book Review: How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer

How Should We Then Live.indd

Pages: 265
Pub­lisher: Cross­way
Year: 1976 (2005)
Author: Fran­cis Schaeffer

I wasn’t intro­duced to Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer until a few years ago, when on a par­tic­u­lar forum his name was brought up with a rec­om­men­da­tion to read the The Fran­cis Scha­ef­fer Tril­ogy, even­tu­ally lead­ing me to read How Should We Then Live? I sus­pect I’ll review the for­mer even­tu­ally, and prob­a­bly book by book, but need­less to say How Should We Then Live has been an invalu­able book, espe­cially in any course I’ve taken deal­ing with his­tory and mod­ern thought.

Schaeffer’s objec­tive in this book was to out­line how thought and idea shaped and molded cul­ture, from Rome all the way to our present day (or, rather, his present day), pre­sent­ing his­tory as a con­tin­u­ous and uni­fied flow. He then warns us where he sees our soci­ety head­ing and attempts to give us a solu­tion, a way to change course. … (Read more)

Schaeffer

I’ve been re-reading Fran­cis Schaeffer’s book How Should We Then Live in prepa­ra­tion for writ­ing a review.  While doing so I noticed that his video series (of the same title) had been uploaded to YouTube in it’s entirety. It’s def­i­nitely not HD qual­ity nor is it flashy, but it is worth watch­ing or given a chance for those who aren’t sure if they’re inter­ested. Scha­ef­fer was def­i­nitely unique in his abil­ity to present the sum of his­tory (up until his life time), show­ing how thoughts and world views impacted and shaped those cul­tures lead­ing up to our own. I only first heard of him a few years ago in the four or five of his books that I’ve read, I can eas­ily see why he’s highly regarded by Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­mics (even if they believe his analy­sis was flawed in this or that way).

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