Abiding the Long Defeat How to Evangelize Like a Hobbit in a Disenchanted Age

This book makes a fresh contribution to a growing genre of popular literature facing Christianity’s late-modern or postmodern decline. It situates the broader fate of Christian faith within the eschatological realism of J.R.R. Tolkien’s characterization of history as a “long defeat.” Conor Sweeney contends that the horizon of the “death of God” in the West constitutes an unprecedented escalation of that defeat. He argues that there is but one effective evangelical resistance to the nihilism of our time: simple acts offered in fidelity and love. Convinced that this will require a renewed encounter with the deepest roots of Christian faith, Sweeney confronts Christianity’s complicity in the death of God and shapes a bold antidote from the perennial hope of our ongoing baptismal participation in Christ’s death and resurrection.