The Christian Century

If by the early years of the 20th century traditional monotheism had not died in the hearts and minds of European intellectuals, as Friedrich Nietzsche had suggested in the mid-1880s that it would, among them God was nonetheless on life support.

This useful, engaging and distressing book by Louis Menand won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2002. It chronicles and exemplifies the skepticism that has characterized most intellectual discourse from the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 21st.