The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently?

Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy?

Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist "cube" of the Great Arch of La D├®fense in Paris with the civilization that produced the ÔÇ£cathedralÔÇØ of Notre-Dame, George Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis that is eroding Europe's soul and threatening its futureÔÇöwith dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world.

Weigel traces the origins of the atheistic humanism of 19th-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold WarÔÇöand, most ominously, the Continent's de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death.

And yet, many Europeans still insist 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 ÔÇ£cathedralÔÇØ can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone's freedom; the people of the ÔÇ£cubeÔÇØ cannot. In the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.