The capacity of western liberalism to sustain public debate, much less foster the cultural conditions within which persuasion and assent can occur, has been deteriorating for some time. But it is now becoming well-nigh impossible due to three interrelated trends.

First, the disintegration of "knowledge" and the splintering of academic disciplines mean that books written by specialists are trapped within what Daniel Lord Smail has described as "the inflationary spiral of research overproduction" (with thanks to Brad Gregory for this reference). In other words, more and more is being written about less and less, and scholars have become almost pathologically wary of venturing outside their intellectual niches. As a result, the benefits of nuanced, patient scholarship are being restricted to ever-more specialized, and thus ever-shrinking, audiences - a development about which Max Weber was keenly aware back in 1918.

By contrast (and this is the second trend) there is a burgeoning, bloated market for books that brazenly peddle sensationalist and cartoonish depictions of history, theology, philosophy and ethics - the "Dan-Brown-ization" of our intellectual life, if you will.

This trend would be noxious on its own, to be sure. But when coupled with a media irresistibly drawn to the simplistic, the salacious and the cynical, and accompanied by the proliferation of incestuous online pseudo-communities (which today constitute a kind of anarchic "fifth estate"), then this trend becomes a toxic stream reinforcing a culture prone to bigotry, which nonetheless prides itself on its liberality and open-mindedness.

Third, alongside - or, rather, underneath - the over-specialization of academic publishing and the sensationalization of popular-intellectual writing, there has been a withering of the literary moral imagination. I'm not here referring to the kind of clipped, foreclosed ethical horizon that one finds in, say, Iris Murdoch, whose novels so often came to resemble medieval morality plays. Whenever fiction writers attempt to nail down the ethical, as D.H. Lawrence brilliantly observed, "it either kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail!"

Instead, the literary moral imagination refers not just to the capacity of the novel to preserve a kind of patient, paradoxical questioning in an era of desiccated, secular dogmatism; to provide, as James Wood puts it, "narratives [which] make comprehensible, make real, the ambiguity, the contradiction, the intermittence, even the absurdity and comic irrationality of our ideational lives."

It also refers to the capacity of the novel to imagine social formations of the Good, to project examples of virtuous human community utterly unlike our claustrophobic present, and yet winsome enough to sow the seeds of an as yet unrealized society. (Here Marilynne Robinson would represent a rare and particularly luminous contemporary example.)

But instead of the virtuous sociality that Alasdair McIntyre so admired in Jane Austen, or the fierce "ecstasy of the ordinary" that G.K. Chesterton loved in Charles Dickens, or the radiantly mundane sanctorum communio that Von Balthasar saw in Bernanos, today we have to endure the suffocating and invariably self-indulgent onanism of Jonathan Franzen, or the brutal naturalism of Ian McEwan, or the hysterical amoralism of Haruki Murakami - each luxuriating in our social dysfunction, and each unable to imagine anything beyond it. At least Michel Houellebecq, while grotesque, is consciously groping his way along the moral limitations of our time, thereby tracing the outlines of a society-to-come, albeit by means of a fictional via negativa, much like Aldous Huxley and, in a different way, Flannery O'Connor before him.

And so, caught between the ghettoization of academic knowledge on one side, and mass-marketing of neo-propagandistic sensationalism on the other, all the while lacking the kind of fictional loam capable of nurturing a virtuous social imaginary, we find ourselves inhabiting an increasingly conflictual public space in which winning "arguments" are determined by sales and media exposure, and not by truth, coherence or expertise. This is, of course, just another manifestation of the capricious exercise of power-divorced-from-truth to which Pope Benedict XVI has been persistently pointing.

While there is frankly little hope of altering our predominant cultural condition in the foreseeable future, we can try to recover the kinds of grand narratives that fundamentally change the way we tell the story of how we arrived at this cultural moment, and cultivate a common conceptual and moral vocabulary so that we can at least agree on what matters.

To this end, 2011 was a bumper year for big, discipline-defying books - books that, if read widely enough, might just save us all. Here are the five books that, to my mind, represent the most effective antidote to our contemporary malaise:

Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2011).

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Bishop's book, not least because of the unchallenged, well-nigh hegemonic place occupied by medicine in western culture. (If Herve Juvin's description of the theological status of "the body" is correct, it's easy to see why medicine has acquired a kind of liturgical function, the chief way that we express our devotion to the body: "After gods, after revolutions, after financial markets, the body is becoming our truth system. It alone endures. It alone remains. In it we place all our hopes, from it we expect a reality which elsewhere is leaking away. It has become the centre of all powers, the object of all expectations, even those of salvation.") But it is precisely the dominance of medicine and specific forms of medical practice that makes the mode of Bishop's engagement so impressive.

The theoretical backbone of the book is a kind of Foucauldian genealogical account of the emergence of "medicine" as an institution and a practice (reminiscent of, but in every way superior to, the critique of "medical civilization" by Ivan Illich), the point of which is to lay bare the disavowed ground of contemporary medicine - the normativity of the corpse, the body subjected to complete knowledge and control. Around this theoretical critique, Bishop weaves a series of beautiful and at times unbearably moving biographical vignettes, in order both to counter medicine's dehumanizing sterility and to reclaim these specific stories from the indifference of the clinic - to bring the corpses back to life, as it were.

It is Bishop's deft weaving of individual stories through the larger story of modernity that enables him to locate those "places at the margins of contemporary life, at the margins in spaces created by liberalism and biopolitics." And, as Catholic bioethics has long argued, it is these liminal spaces that could prove the most fertile for a theological engagement with modernity:

"It might just be that the practices of religious communities marginalized in modernity and laughed at as unscientific are the source of a humane medicine. Perhaps there, in living traditions informed by a different understanding of space and time, where location and story provide meaningful contexts to offer once again hospitality to the dying as both cura corporis and cura animae, we will find a unity of material, function, form, and purpose."

The theological acuteness and pastoral warmth that flow through Jeffrey Bishop's book make it the most compelling argument for the superiority of this type of humane medicine over the ubiquitous and utterly flaccid "biopsychosociospiritual" pretensions of modern medical practice. But as a challenge to the story of western liberalism, and the central place of medicine within it, The Anticipatory Corpse is also the most important book of 2011 - one that, God willing, will continue to haunt us for years to come.

Ian Ker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

There can be no doubt that Gilbert Keith Chesterton was one of the titans of late-Victorian British culture. But that he is the rightful successor of the "the great Victorian 'sages'," and indeed a literary critic of exceptional sophistication and insight - in every way the equal of Ben Johnson, Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot - well, that is a more difficult case to make in the minds of many. But Ian Ker, author of the justly famed biography of John Henry Newman, has now surely put the matter beyond dispute.

Ker's monumental life of Chesterton is not just the fullest intellectual portrait of this brilliant, eccentric, infuriating man; it is also a staggeringly "deep" depiction of the cultural and moral conditions of industrial-capitalist, newly post-Christian England. Against this backdrop, Chesterton's utter disdain for the cultural and capitalist elite, his fierce fondness for the masses - both bound up with his love of Dickens, and his corresponding loathing of George Bernard Shaw - and his obsession with the paradoxes of Christianity take on a particular radiance.

In fact, as Ker demonstrates repeatedly, it was Chesterton's own peculiar, paradoxical Catholicism that presented him with unconventional, frequently outrageous alternatives to the dominant cultural forces of his time: the perversions of capitalism and socialism alike (which he countered with distributivism), the sham pretensions of British high culture (virtuous, even Dickensian, populism) and a creeping, ubiquitous cynicism (for which the only antidote is raucous humour - for, truly, what can be funnier than the idea of the Incarnation, or than a God who, for a moment, becomes an atheist?).

Ker's Chesterton is no saint, to be sure. But he is a clarion prophet at the dawn of modernity - a prophet whose voice we ignore to our peril.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2012).

"Judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval Christendom failed, the Reformation failed, confessionalized Europe failed, and Western modernity is failing, but each in different ways and with different consequences, and each in ways that continue to remain important in the present."

Such is the bleak conclusion of Brad Gregory's extraordinary new book, whose central narrative will be familiar to anyone who has been following debates surrounding secularism, or has engaged to any degree with Charles Taylor, Talal Asad or John Milbank. In essence, Gregory explores the way that the continental Reformation shattered the (admittedly non-ideal) "institutionalized worldview" of medieval Christianity, thereby unleashing a kind of agonistic Christian pluralism. This form of radical theological disagreement and its attendant transformation of Christian moral-social practice into individual piety would then, according to Gregory, in the conditions of the secular state, set in motion the "hyperpluralism" (in which there is not even minimal agreement on what Gregory calls "the Life Questions") and social fragmentation that characterizes us today.

We are, in other words, now living with the consequences of early modern Europe's problem of religious disagreement and coexistence - or, as Milbank puts it, we are living in a time, not simply of moral pluralism or globalized capitalism, but of "rampant heresy." For while western liberalism provided a solution - albeit, a partial one - to the problem of religious disagreement by means of the historically new definition of "religion" and the quarantining of religion off into the domain of the private, what it could not provide is a coherent, intelligible substitute for the unifying role played by institutional Christianity in the Middle Ages. As Gregory convincingly argues, this lack of any such common ground, of a minimal agreement on what matters is eroding the foundations of liberalism itself:

"the ideological secularism of the public sphere and the naturalist metaphysical assumptions of academic life, combined with the state of philosophy and the explanatory successes of the natural sciences, prevent the articulation of any intellectually persuasive warrant for believing in the realities presupposed by liberal political discourse and the institutional arrangements of modernity: that there are such things as persons, and that they have such things as rights. Secularism and scientism are thus subverting modernity's most fundamental assumptions from within ..."

But however brilliant is Gregory's historical presentation (and it is brilliant), what ultimately distinguishes The Unintended Reformation is the sheer forcefulness of the narrative, which he pursues by examining the shift in perspectives on six distinct but interrelated themes since the sixteenth century: God, truth, institution, ethics, consumption and knowledge. The effect of this approach is to give the book an uncommon clarity: by going over what is essentially the single narrative in six different ways, each slight turn of the story illuminates the whole, and each new element comes across as both surprising and yet strangely familiar.

The Unintended Reformation is unquestionably the most important contribution to the way we understand our present condition since Charles Taylor's A Secular Age . But it is also as a stinging rebuke to all those well-nigh fictitious accounts of the emergence of the enlightened West out of the intellectual darkness and decrepitude of the Middle Ages that now distort our collective self-perception. Let's hope Gregory's book wreaks havoc on some of these myths that we persist in telling ourselves.

Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2011).

When the most influential sociologist of religion since Max Weber decides that the crowning achievement of his intellectual labour will be about the emergence of religion in human society, it is natural, I suppose, to hope that the result will be somewhat more satisfying than those many hamfisted attempts to explain (away) the religious impulse by ultra-Darwinists and their impersonators in the media.

But Robert Bellah's magnum opus does far more than just satisfy. It provides a transformative and thrillingly interdisciplinary account of the evolution of religion itself - whose social and cosmological dimensions he helpfully highlights by defining religion as "a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence" - from its origins in play among mammals, through its mimetic and narrative iterations, up to its redefinition across the Mediterrean and Far East during the so-called "axial age" (roughly the eighth to sixth centuries BCE, a period that interestingly coincides with the emergence of Assyria as a Mesopotamian proto-"super power" and the appearance of money in Asia Minor).

Indeed, it is to the religio-political transformations of this "axial age" that Bellah devotes most of his book. But in one of his most interesting asides, Bellah finds that, although what makes the "axial age" axial is the emergent understanding of religion as "theory," one of the prime drivers of political and social change in the first millennium BCE were narrative practices. Such instances of structured, exuberant "popular" or even properly democratic culture were able both to anticipate and effect new social forms. In the case of the festival of Dionysus, he writes:

"religious practice not only made possible the idea of a different social reality than the one existing, but helped to actualize it as well. Although the capacity to imagine alternative social realities is part of what we have described as the axial transition, it is interesting that in this case it does not involve anything explicitly theoretical ... Of course the Greeks did ... write theory, though not much in the way of democratic theory. But theory, too, as well as democratic reform, arose from indispensable mimetic and narrative foundations."

So expert and simultaneously readable is Religion in Human Evolution - a model of academic writing - that it effectively banishes the paltry efforts of Daniel Dennett and Pascal Boyer and Robert Wright (books which, Bellah has said, frankly "should not have been written") to pseudo-intellectual oblivion, where they belong.

For observers of American politics, there can be few more immutable fixtures than the grubby collusion of big business, viscerally anti-statist populism and Christian conservatism - three elements which, together, would seem to constitute the soul of the Republican party. But as Marcia Pally convincingly demonstrates, this alliance is at best an historical aberration, and at worst the by-product of craven political expedience perpetrated in the 1970s. It should not surprise us, then, that this alliance should have splintered to a considerable extent in the wake of the grotesqueries of the George W. Bush administration, when the inherent contradictions among them became most apparent.

But Pally's book is about far more than the rather unedifying world of Republican politics. It is about the way that "Evangelical" - that is, Protestant, theologically conservative - Christian communities, under the weight of a re-engagement with Christian theology itself (most often mediated through fresh encounters with Catholic orthodoxy and Mennonite pacifism), are reclaiming a kind of distinctive and theologically coherent social vocation, one that by-passes the state and the temptations of moral legislation altogether.

What emerges is the picture of a "movement" (although this word may suggest rather more coherence than is currently warranted) that is radically "pro-life," now no longer defined solely by an opposition to abortion, but to all those elements that make up our "culture of death" - militarist bravado, anti-immigrant and homophobic bigotry, profligate consumption, environmental degradation, libertinism, capitalism, and so on. But it is Pally's description of the communal mode of this opposition that is so compelling. For, as John Milbank writes in his brilliant Foreword to the book (which, on its own, is worth the price of admission), in The New Evangelicals we encounter Christians

"who sustain the dislike of the Religious Right for high taxation and bureaucratic, impersonal state charity, while nevertheless believing that church voluntary work, far from being 'remedial' in character, should be so radical and so far-reaching as to sustain everywhere a just economy and local practices of neighbourly reciprocity that would ideally preclude the need for a 'welfare state' altogether."

Marcia Pally has chronicled the mass exodus of Evangelical Protestants away from their traditional political homeland with greater sympathy and more deftness than has heretofore been attempted, much less achieved. (A similar exodus is happening among Evangelical Catholics, but that is another story for another book.) That her book is such a success owes fully as much to her generosity - to the fact that she has bothered to listen so attentively to leaders and lay people alike - as it does to her prodigious intelligence and insight.

But in telling this story, Pally has managed something else entirely: she has managed to provide a convincing alternative to the corrupted and mutually corrupting practices of Christian political lobbying. By fixing her attention on local Christian communal practices and authentic expressions of vulnerable hospitality, her book is a timely reminder to the church of just what it means to be the Church.

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And, for good measure, here is another group of ten books that are, quite simply, un-missable:

While I have deliberately restricted myself to single-author books in the above list, it would also be remiss of me not to mention some truly brilliant collections that demonstrate a coherence and provocation uncommon in this genre: Adrian Pabst's The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict's Social Encyclical and the Future of Political Economy is the most forceful demonstration to date for the capacity of Catholic social teaching to provide a genuine alternative to defunct capitalism; George Levine's The Joys of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now and Rethinking Secularism by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmyer and Jonathan VanAntwerpen mark a fundamental shift in the contemporary debate about secularism, and redefine the questions that we will all be wrestling with for years to come; and Shari'a in the West by Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney is the most important contribution to the conversation surrounding illiberal religious communities within western liberalism to have appeared in many years (the chapters by Tariq Modood, Abdullah Saeed and John Witte Jr, as well as John Milbank's two-part tour de force, are among the best you will ever read on the topic).

Finally, two books were published in French last year that, I predict, will have a seismic effect on the faux-certainties of western secularism when they finally appear in translation: Remi Brague's Les Ancres dans le ciel , or "Anchors in the heavens" (Editions du Seuil, 2011) and Tariq Ramadan's L'Islam et le reveil arabe , "Islam and the Arab Awakening" (Presses du Chatelet, 2011)

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But now, over to you: what are some of the books, whether fiction or non-fiction, that I've missed, but that we all ought to be talking about?