“Like Tom Howard’s classic ‘Chance or the Dance?,’ this book brilliantly juxtaposes the two worldviews of our European civilization. If you want to know why Europe is stumbling toward a secular abyss, this is the ticket.”
About the Book
The Cube and the Cathedral
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,” Notre-Dame, 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.
About the Author
George Weigel
George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. Weigel is the author or editor of some twenty books, including Socrates Pick, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (2006); The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (2010); Practicing Catholic: Essays Historical, Literary, Sporting, and Elegiac (2012); Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (2013); and City of Saints: A Pilgrimage to John Paul II’s Kraków (2015). His essays, op-ed columns, and reviews appear regularly in major opinion journals and newspapers across the United States. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is also Senior Vatican Analyst for NBC News. His weekly column, The Catholic Difference, is syndicated to eighty-five newspapers and magazines in seven countries.
