What I'm Reading

We are going away for the weekend, and I thought I would bring along a book that was given to me by my very absent blogging buddy, Dr Bombay. I love Catholic fiction - there isn't much of it, it seems, and this book looks good. Written in 1907 by Robert Hugh Benson, a Catholic priest and monsignor who was once an Anglican priest, here is the description Baronius Press gives the book:

Described by Fulton Sheen as one of the three greatest depictions of the advent of the demonic in world literature, Lord of the World is science fiction with a difference. The West has succumbed to a sort of international socialism. The forces of secular materialism, relativism and state control are everywhere triumphant. Protestantism is no more, and Catholicism – which had made some major advances in the first half of the twentieth century – has been devastated by the development of new psychologies and the exodus of intellectuals in the wake of an Ecumenical Council. Euthanasia has become an instrument of the state, Esperanto the universal second language. Nevertheless, although organised religion has largely collapsed in the face of institutional secularism, a vague, humanistic religiosity – militantly hostile to the exclusive and supernatural claims of the Church – is present everywhere. Finally, the East, which has amalgamated into a single, pantheistic bloc, continues to pose a military threat. Enter Julian Felsenberg – diplomat, scholar, guru, Antichrist...