Christopher Dawson wrote The Judgment of the Nations in 1942, in the midst of the horrors of World War II. He took four years in the writing of it, years, he claimed, "more disastrous than any that Europe had known since the fourteenth century." By his own admission it had cost him greater labor and thought than any other book he had written. It is, perhaps, his most characteristic work. Dawson argues in compressed form for what he laid out more systematically...