George Weigel
Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy and its discontents in the twenty-first century? Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist â€œcubeâ€ of the Great Arch of La DÃ©fense in Paris with the civilization that produced the â€œcathedralâ€ of Notre-Dame, George Weigel argues that Europeâ€™s embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europeâ€™s soul and threatening its futureâ€”with dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world.Weigel traces the origins of â€œEuropeâ€™s problemâ€ to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold Warâ€”and, most ominously, the Continentâ€™s de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death.And yet, many Europeans still insistâ€”most recently, during the debate over a new EU constitutionâ€”that only a public square shorn of religiously-informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite, Weigel suggests, is true: the people of the â€œcathedralâ€ can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyoneâ€™s freedom; the people of the â€œcubeâ€ cannot.Can there be any true â€œpoliticsâ€â€”any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedomâ€”without God? George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is â€œNo,â€ because, in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.
Politics,Religion,Christianity,Catholic,Nonfiction,History,Religion,Theology,Philosophy,Christian,Religion,Christianity,Cultural
The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God