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This is an interesting book about Christian humanism in an age of crisis, specifically during the Second World War. It features five Christian intellectuals – Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Auden and Simone Weil (I'm not sure she would entirely accept this label) tracking their thoughts and writings during the Second World War as they struggled with deeper cultural issues and the role of Christianity in renewing democracy and defining the human being in relation to technology, the personal to the impersonal. The sense of humanism here embraces the contribution of philosophy, literature and the arts, with the individual dialectic between faith and doubt. There is a very good contextual analysis of Eliot's Four Quartets and in-depth treatment of the later writings of Simone Weil. I was particularly interested in her essay 'The Romanesque Renaissance' about the role of the Languedoc culture in the 13th century, ruthlessly eliminated by the Albigensian Crusade. She thinks that the Church made a serious error in choosing force over love and abandoning peaceful coexistence. The author concludes that the diagnostic powers of these five thinkers were very considerable in analysing 'the means by which technocracy had arisen and the damage it had inflicted' but without being able to propose an implementable solution when the cultural influence of Christianity itself emerged diminished from the War.