"This book is an excellent complement to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and a powerful counterpoint to Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God. All three hold that the story of modern philosophy is both superficial and hollow if its theological/metaphysical components are denied. Highly recommended."

Choice

"The Theological Origins of Modernity is not just informative; it is insightfully recuperative as well—helping us to understand ourselves better in the present. Though Gillespie only reaches our contemporary situation in his last chapter, we might hope that, incomplete as it unavoidably is, that chapter might form the nucleus of a successor work. At the end of his current book we are more than assured that Gillespie is up to the task."

Stephen A. Erickson | Review of Politics

"In this rich and dense book, [Gillespie] is self-consciously trying to correct the ’standard’ understanding of the origin of modernity. Rather than being the ’victory of secularism,’ modernity, he says, is a series of attempts to grapple with fundamental theological issues."

Brad Green | Chronicles