Book recommendation: The Cube and the Cathedral

I’m reading George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God and want to recommend it to anyone trying to understand more deeply the religious underpinnings of culture.

Weigel posits WWI as the point where the cataclysmic dislocation from a Christian to secular atheist of European society occurred. Of course the ideas of secular atheism have antecedents in earlier epochs, but they emerged as part of Christian culture because of the great dislocation. Only when WWI ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, has it become clear how radical the secularist atheism really is.

I’m only about a third of the way through it but there are quite a few gems in the book. (Missourian, you would like the facts on the decline of European culture; one example: Sweden has a poverty class greater than the US.) One is this: the social structures of secular atheism always work towards the destruction of people. So true when you think of it: abortion, euthanasia, etc. It’s what we call the “culture of death.”

The “Cube” of the title (La Grande Arche de la Defense) serves as counterpoint to the “Cathedral” (Notre Dame) which reflect de-Christianized Europe against a formerly Christian Europe.

Take a loot at the book the next time you are at B&N. (Better yet, order it through the link above and send a couple of quarters my way to help pay for this site.) Many OT readers will like it.

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Biblical Aspects of the Question of Faith and Politics

LewRockwell.com Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

[This is a homily that was delivered on 26 November 1981 in the course of a service for Catholic members of the Bundestag in the church of St. Wynfrith (Boniface) in Bonn. The readings provided for the day by the lectionary were 1 Peter 1:3-7 and John 14:1-6. At first sight they seemed to be out of keeping with the subject, but on closer inspection they showed themselves to be unexpectedly fruitful.]

The epistle and gospel that we have just listened to have their origin in a situation in which Christians were not citizens of a state who were able to shape their own lives but the persecuted victims of a cruel dictatorship. They could not share in responsibility for their state but simply had to endure it. It was not granted to them to shape it as a Christian state; instead their task was to live as Christians despite it. The names of two emperors in whose reigns tradition dates these two passages are enough to cast light on the situation: they were Nero and Domitian. Thus the first letter of Peter describes Christians as strangers within this state (1:1) and the state itself as Babylon (5:13). By doing so it indicates very impressively the political position that Christians were in; it corresponded more or less to that of the Jews living in exile in Babylon who were not responsible citizens of that state but subjects without any rights, and who thus had to learn how they might survive in it, not how they could build it up. Thus the political background of today’s readings is fundamentally different from ours. Nevertheless they contain three important statements which are significant for political activity among Christians.

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Christians are leaving the town of Bethlehem

Los Angeles Times Ken Ellingwood

Palestinians among them grow tired of Israeli roadblocks, outbreaks of hostility.

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — From an office near the traditional birthplace of Christ, Mayor Hanna Nasser frets about the prospects for Christians in his slice of the Holy Land.

The outbreak of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians more than four years ago has accelerated emigration by Palestinian Christians that began years earlier.
[Read more…]

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‘Good sex for teens’: The war against abstinence

TownHall.com Robert Rector

Each year, more than 3 million teenagers contract a sexually transmitted disease. In addition to the threat of disease and pregnancy, sexually active teens are three times more likely than teens who aren’t sexually active to become depressed and to attempt suicide.

Clearly, it’s in society’s interest to discourage teen sex. Teens themselves realize this: According to a Zogby poll, more than 90 percent of them say that society should teach kids to abstain from sex until they have, at least, finished high school. Parents want a stronger message: Almost nine in 10 want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they’re married or in an adult relationship that is close to marriage.

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The end of self-reliance?

Townhall.com George Will

WASHINGTON — It hurt her feelings, says Jane Fonda, sharing her feelings, that one of her husbands liked them to have sexual threesomes. `”It reinforced my feeling I wasn’t good enough.'”

In the Scottsdale, Ariz., Unified School District office, the receptionist used to be called a receptionist. Now she is “director of first impressions.” The happy director says, “Everyone wants to be important.”

Manufacturers of pens and markers report a surge in teachers’ demands for purple ink pens. When marked in red, corrections of students’ tests seem so awfully judgmental.

Fonda’s confession, Scottsdale’s tweaking of terminology and the recoil from red markings are manifestations of today’s therapeutic culture. The nature and menace of “therapism” is the subject of a new book, “One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance” by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, M.D., resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Maureen Dowd: “The Cafeteria is closed”

From the Touchstone Blog:

Maureen Dowd from her column in today’s editions of The New York Times on the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI:

“For American Catholics – especially women and Democratic pro-choice Catholic pols – the cafeteria is officially closed.”

While good Christians will disagree with Ms. Dowd about the exclusion of “women” during the new papacy (do any of the women in this AP photo‹nuns, teenagers, mothers, etc.‹seem left out to you?), so far as the closing of the American Catholic Cafeteria, pan-orthodox Christians (whether Protestant, Orthodox or Catholic) can respond with a hearty “Amen.” We never liked the food from that joint anyway.

“The Cafeteria is Closed” might serve as the new motto for the Ratzinger Fan Club.

–Kenneth Tanner

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Benedict XVI: A theologian succeeds a philosopher at the Vatican

Wall Street Opinion Journal Kenneth L. Woodward

The great surprise of yesterday’s papal election is that the new pope is no surprise. As the long-time Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the best-known figure at the Vatican apart from John Paul II himself. In American political terms, his elevation to the papacy is much like a highly visible vice president replacing a president. Clearly, the conclave that elected him wanted continuity rather than change. That is the only surprise.

Like his predecessor, the new pope is a genuine intellectual. But where John Paul II was a professional philosopher, Benedict XVI is a theologian. And although the two men worked closely together, the differences showed.

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College taught her not to be a heterosexual

Townhall.com Dennis Prager April 19, 2005

Perhaps the most important argument against same-sex marriage is that once society honors same-sex sex as it does man-woman sex, there will inevitably be a major increase in same-sex sex. People do sexually (as in other areas) what society allows and especially what it honors.

One excellent example illustrating this is an article recently written in the McGill University newspaper by McGill student Anna Montrose. In it, she wrote:

It’s hard to go through four years of a Humanities B.A. reading Foucault and Butler and watching ‘The L Word’ and keep your rigid heterosexuality intact. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but it seems I no longer have the easy certainty of pinning my sexual desire to one gender and never the other.

(Michel Foucault is a major French “postmodern” philosopher; Judith Butler is a prominent “gender theorist” at UC Berkeley; and “The L-Word” is a popular TV drama about glamorous lesbians.)

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Gay bishop backs Planned Parenthood

THE WASHINGTON TIMES Jon Ward

Planned Parenthood should target “people of faith” to promote abortion rights and comprehensive sex education, the Episcopal Church’s first openly homosexual bishop told a gathering in the District yesterday.

“In this last election we see what the ultimate result of divorce from communities of faith will do to us,” New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson said during Planned Parenthood’s fifth annual prayer breakfast.

“Our defense against religious people has to be a religious defense. … We must use people of faith to counter the faith-based arguments against us,” he said.

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