Better than Babylon: A new vision for western culture

Author: Tom Casey SJ
Publisher: Paulist Press

What is Babylon? Babylon is that which blocks our access to the door of possibility, that which impoverishes. Babylon is the part of Western culture that imprisons us with its seductive images of false happiness and fulfillment. Better Than Babylon invites us to break free of our prisons. It urges us to reject the subtle enslavement that blinds us to what’s important, the superficial images that prevent us from touching the soul of things. By engaging with key issues in our culture – women, family, education, work, the environment, war and peace – author Thomas Casey calls upon us to break through the door and go beyond our habitual ways of looking at them.

This book is an invitation to go beyond Babylon: “Babylon, comfortable as it may be, need not be our lasting prison. The world of possibility is much vaster than we dared imagine. This truth can set us free” (from the Introduction).

God has bigger hopes for us than Babylon could ever entertain.

Written with the best of Irish wit and eloquence, this book expounds brilliantly basic challenges to human living and responses illuminated by faith in Jesus. A stunning achievement, this work should definitively establish Tom Casey as an outstanding Christian author for our times.

GERALD O’COLLINS SJ (Research Professor and Writer-in-Residence, Jesuit Theological College, Melbourne; Professor Emeritus, Gregorian University, Rome)

The Rev. Thomas G. Casey SJ is the director of Jewish studies and professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.