Weigel's New Book
Great review about Weigel's new book, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God. LINK. Two excerpts, one about Weigel and one about the book:
About Weigel:
Mr. Weigel is a shining example of that elusive species, the Catholic intellectual.
Many non-Catholics have trouble with this notion, which sounds like an oxymoron. How can an intellectual, who by definition is undogmatic, simultaneously offer obedience to an all embracing worldview that proclaims its own infallibility? In Mr. Weigel's case, dedication to the truth in no way conflicts with his faith.
In his remarkable little primer, "Letters to a Young Catholic," Mr. Weigel took his readers on a series of pilgrimages to places where great Catholic personalities have struggled to reconcile this world and the next, places like the bar in London's Fleet Street, where G.K. Chesterton used to drink. Chesterton was as worldly a scribbler as ever drained a pint of beer, but whereas the hack work of his journalist contemporaries has perished, his books and essays still glow with an insight that owes everything to his faith. What makes Catholic Christianity distinctive among religions is, in one sense, its worldliness.
About the book:
Mr. Weigel suggests four possible scenarios: Europe reinvents itself as a godless paradise on earth; Europe muddles through; Europe reconverts to Christianity; or (the nightmare scenario) Islam inherits the hollowed-out shell of a civilization, reversing the historic defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
And what does Mr. Weigel think is most likely to happen? Like Mr. Weiler, he believes that the people of the cube and the people of the cathedral can coexist - but only if each respects the other's values. Christians and Jews are enjoined to love their neighbor by God, but what authority do they invoke against those who refuse to acknowledge even a historical debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition? It is a truism that God and politics should be kept apart, lest religious intolerance intrude into the secular world. But politics without God is often far more intolerant and always ultimately sterile - in Europe's case, literally so.
