Clearly, there’s a theme to today’s posts, about literature, the West, the classics, and reading.  At City Journal, Bruce Thornton reviews Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, by George Weigel, where the author “gives Christian answers to the West’s most pressing questions.”  Weigel is also the author of The Cube and the Cathedral, which you may’ve heard of.

Weigel examines the implications that restoring Christian-and more specifically Catholic-philosophical and theological perspectives to our political discourse would have in a host of areas, including foreign policy, globalization, the problems of the Third World, the role of faith in politics, abortion, bioethics, the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad, and many others. Weigel’s analysis of political freedom is particularly valuable, for the starting point of all other political disputes is our understanding of liberty.

A contemporary idea had by any school child and sold by the media is that we have democracy in America simply because we’re smart, enlightened people who really, really want freedom.  It sounds like Weigel would disagree.  We have freedom because of the moral and philosophical systems that we have in the West.

In contrast to the materialist determinism or secularist scientism dominating our public discourse, Weigel himself exemplifies what he describes as the “Christian realist sensibility-an understanding of the inevitable irony, pathos, and tragedy of history; alertness to unintended consequences; a robust skepticism about schemes of human perfection (especially when politics is the instrument of salvation); [and] cherishing democracy without worshipping it.”

That’s a nice thought: a Christian realist.  Not a Christian Dominionist who wants a Senate full of deacons, and not a Christian Secularist who wants to build a wall of impenetrability between church and everything else.