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We inhabit a time of crisis — totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. The author of this book is invested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern lies with how these phenomena all represent a crisis within — and a threat to — thinking itself. In his first book to be translated into English, the author radicalizes Heidegger's understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of truth as apocalypse. This “apocalypse of truth” works as an unveiling that reveals both the finitude and mystery of truth, allowing a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, the book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of the author's analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of “the abyss of the deity.” Here, the book articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god who has already passed by, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. The book presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

Engaging for the first time in apologetics, philosopher Jean-Luc Marion not only defends the French Catholic Church from its cultured and uncultured despisers alike, but argues that Catholics should be recognized as a special source of help to a Republic and a society mired in “decadence,” where nihilism mitigates against all genuine community. Working through key moments in the history of France and of the Church, especially since the promulgation in 1905 of the law of separation of Church and State, and associated concepts such as “laïcité,” Marion argues that French Catholics, precisely because of their trinitarian experience of God, are uniquely positioned to help their fellow citizens towards a fuller realization of the common good, as expressed in the Republic’s motto of liberty, equality, and fraternity.