{"product_id":"the-cube-and-the-cathedral-isbn-9780465092680","title":"The Cube and the Cathedral","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhy do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy and its discontents in the twenty-first century? 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\" of Notre-Dame, George Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europe's soul and threatening its future -- with dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world. Weigel traces the origins of \"Europe's problem\" to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War -- and, most ominously, the Continent's de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death. And yet, many Europeans still insist -- most recently, during the debate over a new EU constitution -- 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 \"cathedral\" can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone's freedom; the people of the \"cube\" cannot. Can there 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 are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Basic Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44891863580901,"sku":"NP9780465092680","price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/55956417-edca-45b6-986f-ab02010288f8.jpg?v=1767905036","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-cube-and-the-cathedral-isbn-9780465092680","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}