Modern thinkers know they are modern. It is a self-conscious age that, having despised and then forgotten the past, struggles to understand itself. "What...am I to make of the world into which I was born? How else can I make sense of that complacent love of moral squalor, that luxuriant banality, that is the singly spiritual achievement of our age?" asks the nineteenth century French poet Charles Baudelaire via the pen of David Bentley Hart. Deploying a perennial Christian wisdom, these essays provide brilliant insight into modernity's allure and indigence, offering a genuine alternative to the banality of a postmodernity.