The World Turned Upside Down:  The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power

Melanie Phillips

Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Location: The Pacific Club 4110 MacArthur Blvd, Newport Beach
Admission: Members of LWLC: Free
                      Non member; $40.00

RSVP: Seth@LincolnClub.org 
             (949) 272 2965 by February 17

About the Book: As the West turns on its religious and cultural traditions, it is succumbing to the 'soft totalitarianism' of irrational, relativist ideals. With the Islamists intent on returning the free world to the 7th century, it seems western civilization is no longer willing or able to defend modernity and rationalism. In "The World Turned Upside Down", Melanie Phillips explains that the basic cause of this explosion of human irrationality is the slow but steady marginalisation of religion. We tell ourselves that faith and reason are incompatible, but the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible, Phillips asserts, that gave us our concepts of reason, progress, and an orderly world on which science and modernity are based. Without its religious traditions, the West has drifted into mass derangement where truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. Scientists skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts, Israel is demonised, and the US is vilified over the war on terror - all on the basis of blatant falsehoods and obscene propaganda. Worst of all, asserts Phillips, this abandonment of rationality leaves the West vulnerable to its legitimate threats. Faced with the very real challenges of spiraling demographics and violent, confrontational Islamism, the West is no longer willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it once brought into being.

About the Author:  Melanie Phillips is a British journalist, broadcaster and author. Her weekly column, which is currently appearing in The Times, has appeared over the years in the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. She has a weekly radio show on Voice of Israel, is a regular panellist on BBC Radio's The Moral Maze and appears frequently on BBC TV's signature political shows Question Time and The Daily Politics. She also writes regularly for the Jewish Chronicle and the Jerusalem Post, and has spoken to great acclaim on public platforms throughout the English-speaking world.

Her best-selling book Londonistan, about the British establishment's capitulation to Islamist aggression, was published in 2006 by Encounter, New York. She followed this in 2010 with The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, with a foreword by David Mamet and also published by Encounter. Guardian Angel, the memoir of her personal and political journey from being the darling of the left to the iconic defender of Israel and the west, was published in 2013 by emBooks.

You can follow Melanie’s work at
www.facebook.com/MelanieLatest or on Twitter at @melanieLatest.
Her radio show can be heard at www.voiceofisrael.com.