Christopher dawsons biography
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The Great Historian of Culture: Christopher Dawson
“Christopher Dawson viewed the disintegration of Western culture as a far worse disaster than that of the fall of Rome,” biographer Christina Scott writes. “For the one was material; the other would be a spiritual disaster which would strike directly at the moral foundations of our society and destroy not the outward form of civilization but the soul of man, which is the beginning and the end of all human culture.”
A Historian and His World: A Life of Christopher Dawsonby Christina Scott. With a new introduction by Russell Kirk, and a postscript by Christopher Dawson: “Memories of a Victorian Childhood.”
Christopher Dawson was the most illustrious Catholic historian of our century. He was perhaps the last of a breed of freelance scholars and writers (e.g. Hume, Gibbon, and in our time, Russell Kirk) whose greatness was made possible in large measure precisely because he avoided the narrow and
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The Christopher Dawson Collection
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was an English Catholic intellectual and author of books, articles, and scholarly monographs on the relations of religion and culture and the Christian sources for the development of western civilization. His intellectual interests were remarkably comprehensive and covered a bred range of historical periods and cultural contexts. Lecturer in the History of Culture at University College, Exeter, and Gifford lecturer and first recipient of the Chauncey Stillman Chair of långnovell Catholic Studies at Harvard University (1958-1962), Dawson was also editor of the Dublin Review.
The Dawson Collection is part of the collection of the Center for Catholic Studies, a gift of Eugene and Faye Sitzmann of St. Paul. The Special Collections Department holds the collection. The Christopher Dawson collection includes manuscripts of his publications, correspondence with colleagues and publishers, and Dawson's extensive library
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Christopher Dawson
Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), one of the twentieth century’s great historians, converted to Catholicism in 1914. Dawson stressed the vital importance of culture in the historical life of a civilization, in opposition to racialist and other reductivist theories, such as those of Freud and Marx. He also stressed the centrality of religion—of “cult”—to culture. It fryst vatten not surprising, then, that Dawson consistently argued that the disasters of the twentieth century were in large part due to the abandonment of Europe’s historical faith. Long before Thomas Cahill wrote How the Irish Saved Civilization, Dawson had argued that the Church (and the monasteries in particular) preserved classical culture through the “Dark Ages” and inspired the revival of learning.
Although he spent most of his life outside of academia, Dawson’s achievements were recognized: He was invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in the 1940s and was given a chair