Western culture in the twentieth century can be read, in part, as a series of responses to the death of God—to the death in the culture, in other words, of a grounded, public, and shared sense that there is a single, unquestioned set of virtues—Judeo-Christian virtues—in accordance with which one’s life is properly led. As the background assumption of God’s existence receded and atheism and agnosticism grew more common, it became less obvious that Judeo-Christian principles held true for all. Of course, as Dostoyevsky suggested in The Brothers Karamazov, if there is no God then everything is
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