The Third Coming

A groundbreaking history of the medieval Catholic moral philosophy that has challenged the foundations of American politics and culture and the emerging algorithmic order that threatens to overtake it In the 1980s, a generation of intellectually elite, conservative Catholic radicals rose from the cul-de-sacs of postwar suburban America to wage war on Enlightenment liberalism—the foundational creed of the American republic. We live today with the consequences. In The Third Coming, political theorist Peter H. Schwartz delivers an intellectually fearless account of the rise of this radical Catholic elite and the thirteenth-century theological doctrine providing the blueprint for a future in which human sovereignty gives way to the sovereignty of God. Catholic natural law—the doctrinal north star for this religious counterculture—has underpinned Project 2025 and guided Federalist Society judges, Heritage Foundation scholars, MAGA legislators, and right-wing “new media” personalities. Ultimately, Schwartz argues, this medieval resurgence will prove helpless against a third force, the quantum future of the information age in which the algorithm is sovereign—a future arriving faster than we can imagine. Provocative, enlightening, and brilliantly argued, The Third Coming is an essential guide to understanding the collision of America’s past, present, and future, and what comes next.