Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth

New English Review Press is pleased to announce the publication of our thirty-seventh title, Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth by Albert Norton Jr. We believe this is one of the most significant books we have ever published. The books are in and we’d be happy to send you one.

You may be asking yourself why the world is so crazy. We seem to have lost the ability to agree on fundamental truths. Everyone seems to be running toward something, but could it be that we are running away from something greater? In Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth, Albert Norton makes the case that confronting the reality of God in the postmodern world is a dangerous proposition. Dangerous to our most cherished notions of reality. Dangerous to our comfortable worldview and how we see ourselves. To find out why this postmodern turn has come to pass, Norton insists we must ask ourselves Pilate’s age-old question: What is truth?

It could be that in the postmodern age we don’t merely disagree about whether something is true, but that we disagree about how truth and values are formed in the first place. To begin to understand this, we really must start with how we think and form value judgments in general. We share an orientation to objective truth, in our thinking, and we build on rational processes of binary differentiation. This should lead us to an objective and real hierarchy of ideals, rather than a subjective or socially-produced narrative.

To understand this, a history of truth formation is presented, distinguishing the medieval to modern periods, and then the modern to postmodern, highlighting the thinking of Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, William James, and John Dewey, among many others. This leads to a discussion of truth at the hands of postmodernists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty. The purpose is to trace the intellectual movements shaping the determination of truth and values, from individualism to collectivism, correspondence theory to pragmatism, anxiety about meaning as expressed in existentialism, and Marxism re-worked for cultural application—the “woke” movement.

The author concludes: Truth exists as a real and extant feature of the universe. It is objective and unchanging and “out there.” It resides in and emanates from and is personified in God, the ideal of the ideals; the pinnacle of the hierarchy of values that we perceive, rather than create.

Advance Praise:

This is a refreshing reassertion of the answerability of the God argument without unnecessary elaboration or extravagant claims, and a learned but never recondite reminder that it is not so difficult to be sensible and morally confident without being unphilosophical or hidebound: an informative, often delightful read. —Conrad Black, author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, A President Like No Other: Donald J. Trump and the Restoring of America, and Flight of the Eagle, a Strategic History of the United States.

In Dangerous God, Albert Norton has written an essential philosophical defense of transcendence. In clear and accessible language, Norton logically and methodically demonstrates the reality of transcendent being and in the process undertakes a full-scale demolition of modern and postmodern epistemologies, including reductionist materialism and the ontological denialism of postmodernism. In the process, he shows how collectivism and the denial of God go hand in hand as collectivism serves a means for the individual to hide from the greatest challenge one can possibly face: the confrontation with the divine transcendent. —Michael Rectenwald, author of Springtime for Snowflakes, Beyond Woke, and Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom.

Whatever your philosophical or religious standpoint, Mr. Norton is sure to challenge it in a constructive and thought-provoking way. His dissection of our current philosophical impasse and its consequences is forthright and illuminating. —Theodore Dalrymple, author of The Terror of Existence, Threats of Pain and Ruin, and Grief and Other Stories.

ALBERT NORTON, JR. is a writer and attorney working in the American South. He is author of Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth (2021) concerning formation of truth and values in a postmodern age; and Intuition of Significance, a 2020 work weighing the merits of theism against materialism. He is also the author of several award-winning short stories, and two novels: Another Like Me (2015) and Rough Water Baptism (2017), on themes of navigating reality in a post-Christian world.

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