The Wager

and Other Selections from the Pensées

By Blaise Pascal and Peter Kreeft
Foreword by Os Guinness
(1995)

Discussion guide included in recent printings.

This excerpt from the classic text comes with helpful modern commentary by philosopher Peter Kreeft.

As America’s and the world’s crises seem to come ever thicker and faster, many people’s thoughts progressively lower until all they care about is the immediate, the practical, the urgent, and the short-term—the “payoff” and the “bottom line.”

Others, however, realize that the deeper the practical problems, the more urgent the need for higher answers. Such people cry out for the wisdom of the ages to address the challenges of today. This edition of the Trinity Forum Reading introduces a best-selling, perennial classic that has always appealed when people are thinking deeply about the human condition—Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (or Thoughts).

Pascal was a seventeenth-century genius, brilliant especially in mathematics. Heralded today as the father of the modern computer, his reputation in his own day rested on his scientific and technical innovations, including the first omnibus system for Paris. His Pensées, however, grew out of his keen insight into the human predicament. Pascal was forming these unfinished jottings into a comprehensive book when, after years of chronic sickness, he died at the age of thirty-nine.

Category: Readings (No. 11)