Book Review

Making the world safe for conversation

Culture
May 23, 2008

THE CASE FOR CIVILITY:

AND WHY OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT

By Os Guinness

HarperCollins, 214 pages, $23.95


In the current international climate, it is easy to point to Muslim extremists as agents of death and destruction. But is such carnage unique to the Muslim religion? And is it the religion itself or its extremism that is the cause?

Scholar and prolific author Os Guinness (Dining With the Devil, Time for Truth) answers these and other provocative questions about religion and secularism and offers a prescription for fostering a world safe for diversity in his new book, The Case forCivility: And Why Our Future Depends on It. The book is long on both organization and on evidence, unfolding like a debate proposition. Nearly every building block in his argument is broken into numbered sub-points. The larger question is whether these blocks form a coherent polemical structure.