Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy in the twenty-first century? Why is Europe dying, demographically? In The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel offers a penetrating critique of "Europe's problem" and draws out its lessons for the rest of the democratic world.
Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist "cube" of the Great Arch of La Defense in Paris with the civilization that produced the "cathedral," Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow and cramped secularism has led to a crisis of civilizational morale that is eroding Europe's soul and failing to create the European future. Even as thoughtful Europeans and Americans wrestle with these grave issues, many European political leaders continue to insist--most recently, during the debate over a new European constitution--that only a public square shorn of religiously informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. The most profound question raised by The Cube and the Cathedral is whether there can be any true "politics"--any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedom--without God. George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is "No" because, in the final analysis, societies and cultures can only be as great as their spiritual aspirations.
Editorial Reviews
"Weigel's impassioned essay on the strange death of European Christianity is at once an elegy and a warning--an elegy for a vulnerable culture that is being effaced by a vacuous secularism, and a warning to Americans that their assumptions about a shared 'Western civilization' are fast becoming obsolete on the eastern side of the Atlantic." --Niall Ferguson, author of Empire and Colossus
"The Cube and the Cathedral makes powerfully clear the self-destructive consequences of squandering one's inheritance." --National Review
"Wigel's pithy polemic boldly assesses contemporary Europe...Sure to be much discussed--and possibly to be remarkably influential." --Kirkus Reviews
"Weigel has a nuanced and restrained vision for the role religion should have in public life--for him, it should e a strong and welcomed voice in democratic debates, but not a voice that drowns out all others...thoroughly readable." --Tulsa World
About the Author
George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's leading commentators on religion and public life, is the author of the acclaimed The Courage to Be Catholic, the international bestseller,Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II, and numerous other books that include The Truth of Catholicism and The Final Revolution. Now a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where he holds the John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy, Weigel writes a weekly column, "The Catholic Difference," that is syndicated to more than forty newspapers around the United States. He is an NBC consultant on the Vatican and appears regularly on network and cable television programs as well as national and local radio. Weigel lives with his wife and their three children in North Bethesda, Maryland.
