In addition it speaks to them of truth, justice, freedom, progress, concord, civilization and peace. The Church well knows the value of these things. It knows them in the light of Christ's revelation. It is also the case that platitudes are no less true because they are platitudes. As the twentieth century draws to an uncertain conclusion, it is widely agreed that we are passing through a moment of spiritual as well as chronological transition.
Wide agreement is here the signal of the platitude that our age is in crisis.
One wants to respond that every age is in crisis, and in particular that the modern epoch may be accurately defined as the age of continuous crises. The response is correct, but it does nothing to ameliorate our own condition. My focus here will be contemporary North American society, but the problems I will address appear in one form or another in all late modern, industrial societies. It is by now a familiar lament that all is not well with us, that something has gone terribly awry with the consumerist cultures of market-modernity. Ordinary men and women speak of a loss of neighborliness, of growing fear and suspicions, of relentless sexual and commercial pressures upon the young.