Home > Work > The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God
1 " European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences or European public life and European culture. "
― George Weigel , The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God
2 " American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important." -Robert Kagan "
3 " By the time the draft constitution for the expanded European Union was finished and ready to be submitted for ratification by the member states, "Europe" as a political entity resembled nothing so much as a teenager who had just gone through a tremendous physical growth spurt but without a parallel growth in intellectual and moral maturity: physically an adult but spiritually stuck in adolescence. . . . Connoisseurs of political texts will note that the European constitution approved in June 2004 contains some 70,000 words (almost ten times the length of the U.S. Constitution). Yet the one word that could not be fit into the constitution for the new Europe--"Christianity"--is the embodiment of a story that has arguably had more to do with "constituting" Europe than anything else. What is going on when this story can't be acknowledged? Is it a case, as suggested above, of an adolescent engaging in a typically adolescent rebellion against parents? Is that rebellion in service of a particular (and particularly adolescent) understanding of the freedom that Europe's new constitution is meant to celebrate and advance? "