The Year of Our Lord 1943 is a fascinating and surprising book. The author, Alan Jacobs, is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Baylor University, Texas. He writes in a lucid style, with worthy scholarship, historical balance and a firm grip on his narrative. He chronicles the war-years thinking and activity of five intellectual giants: Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis. He concludes with a brief analysis of the post-war work of Jacques Ellul, who shared their religious perspective and their concerns about the direction of our technology-saturated culture. Jacobs’s immediate context is straightforward: by…