In Between Two Ages, Van Wishard has provided us with a masterful synthesis of the main currents of history, ranging over the centuries with an expert's eye to identify the key trends in economics, technology and culture that have led us to this place in time. By itself, this would be an important contribution to our understanding. But the true significance of Between Two Ages lies in his placing this analysis within a profoundly moral and ethical framework. Van Wishard has not simply diagnosed the reasons for our spiritual malaise. He has also suggested how each of us can overcome this malaise and find a larger purpose or meaning to our lives. From the foreword by Dr. Mitchell B. Reiss Dean of International Affairs College of William & Mary Introduction Despite the stratospheric heights of the Dow in recent years, the allure of prosperity and the astounding possibilities opening up for human fulfillment, the next three decades could be the most decisive 30-year period in the history of mankind. Thus you and I are living in the midst of perhaps the most uncertain period America has ever known -- more difficult than World War II, the Depression or even the Civil War. With these earlier crises, an immediately identifiable, focused emergency existed, an emergency people could see and mobilize to combat. But the crisis today is of a different character and order. For America is at the vortex of a global cyclone of change so vast and deep that it is uprooting established institutions, altering centuries-old relationships, changing underlying mores and attitudes, and now, so the experts tell us, even threatening the continued existence of the human species. It is not simply change at the margins; it is change at the very core of life. Culture-smashing change. Identity-shattering change. Soul-crushing change.