The modern Western world is full of confusion. Divides over religion, politics, and ethics continue to grow faster by the day. In the midst of this turmoil, a number of proposals have been offered as to why this is happening, along with a variety of solutions to these problems. Jordan Cooper argues that most treatments of our cultural condition do not go far enough in capturing the essential philosophical and theological shifts that have shaped the modern world.

Cooper contends that the crisis faced by Westerners in the twenty-first century cannot be rightly discussed apart from the three transcendentals that shaped the Western tradition from Socrates through the Protestant Reformation: truth, goodness, and beauty. Western man's greatest need is not more technological development, better politicians, or radical revolution; our need is to be connected to the transcendental ground of our own being: God himself.

In this work, these three transcendentals are discussed first as they were developed in classic Western thought, and second, as their importance has declined in the modern world.