Word: twentieths
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...Victorian bookshelves have largely disappeared, but at least one U.S. historian still prefers to see his craft write large. He is Yale University's Kenneth Scott Latourette, 78, a precise, untiring Baptist minister, who has just overseen the publication of his 568-page The Twentieth Century Outside Europe (Harper & Row: $8.50), the fifth and final volume of a series entitled Christianity in a Revolutionary...
Latourette's latest book completes an awesome work that has been widely acclaimed as the best exposition so far of what has happened to Christian churches in the 19th and 20th centuries. Written in a prose that Latourette describes as "clear but unadorned," Twentieth Century is scrupulously impartial to Roman Catholics and Protestants, meticulously supported with statistics and footnotes. Latourette warms noticeably in treating the details of a favorite theme, the growth of Christian missions around the world. He is crisp, exact, and noncommittal in describing the great intellectual trends-the social gospel, the ecumenical movement, the liturgical revival...
Newman wrote something of everything in the long section on Clifford: biography, as detailed as I'd want to read; a fascinating treatment of Clifford's work; and glimpses of the twentieth-century relevance of his visions. These are carefully partitioned, hence Newman's touch is convincing here as nowhere else. Clifford emerges as a superb mathematician even in the company of the nineteenth-century geniuses. He was one of the last to work with equal success on several mathematical fronts, Poincare being perhaps the last who managed it. Clifford spun out the consequences of the new non-Euclidean geometries...
...follows these with a group of intriguing reviews on Pascal, Mill, Wittgenstein, and others of more sensibility than science. The discussion of The Age of Analysis picks up Morton White's rewarding distinction between the "hedgehogs" and "foxes" of twentieth-century philosophy (taken from the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing...
...Church to make greater use of the talents of the American laity. And so it goes. Behind each article lurks the image of conservative opposition. Every piece ends with hope for a brighter future. In the best traditions of liberal Catholicism, the writers urge the Church to seize the twentieth century and shape the future...