Check back here on Monday when our colleague Richard Weikart’s new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life (Regnery), will launch. Dr. Weikart is a historian at California State University, Stanislaus, and the author of From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress.

Here’s the jacket copy for the new book:

Does Human Life Matter?

Many, today, think the answer is: no.

It is not just abortion-on-demand (considered an indispensable right); it is the creeping idea that the disabled should have been aborted as “unproductive” human beings. It is state-sanctioned suicide. It is the dismissal of the elderly as drains on the healthcare system.

The idea that human life is intrinsically valuable is dying side by side with our Christian culture, says author and intellectual historian Richard Weikart. He traces the dangerous trends in Western thinking that could spell what he calls The Death of Humanity.

In his shocking new book, Weikart reveals:

• Why ideas that were used to justify genocide, forced famine, and compulsory sterilization are back in vogue

• How murder has been — and will be — justified as biologically or socially determined

• Why “human rights” might soon become a thing of the past

• How amoral technological progress has overtaken the idea of moral human progress

• Why “animal rights” has nothing to do with being kind and considerate to animals, and everything to do with degrading man

• Why things we take for granted, remnants from our Christian heritage like prohibitions against infanticide, might soon be no more Long ago, the philosopher Richard Weaver reminded us that “ideas have consequences.”

Those consequences, as Richard Weikart explains, are coming home to roost, and they could be truly frightening.

Far from the first time, I remind you that what’s at stake in the evolution debate is precisely the reigning image of a human being and the meaning of human life — whether sacred or dispensable.

Forgetting what should be the inviolable sanctity of life has been a recurring habit in mankind’s past, hardly limited to our own time, as European history shows. But in the West, past horrors were committed despite the most influential moral tradition, which at its heart treated life as worthy of awe because it reflected a purposeful design. Only with scientific materialism does dismissing the value of life acquire a seemingly logical, objective rationale.

We will have much more to say about Dr. Weikart’s important book, starting next week.