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Victor Hanson shows that the "Greek revolution" was not the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, but rather the historic innovation of the independent family farm."--BOOK JACKET.
Well known for his important scholarly contributions to dogmatic theology and biblical commentary, Joseph Ratzinger has also written penetrating observations of our times. This book includes some of his keen insights about the social and political challenges confronting modern Western societies. Writing most of these chapters just before his election as pope, Ratzinger sought to remind Europeans, who at the time were crafting a new constitution, that the civilizational project we call “the West” is a cultural achievement with a history. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome were the three foundation stones upon which Western civilization was built, he wrote. Their invaluable contributions form the basis for the Western understanding of human dignity and human rights, which spread from Europe to the United States and beyond. This book also includes, as an epilogue, a new essay by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI on clerical sex abuse, which traces the moral disorder that preys upon the young to the collapse of faith both inside and outside the Church. “The witness of Christian lives nobly lived is the beginning of reconversion (or, in many cases, conversion) of the West—and that return to the truths taught by the God of the Bible is essential if the great Western civilizational project is not to crumble because of its current, postmodern incoherence. Joseph Ratzinger understood that danger long before many others. It would be well to attend to his prescription.” —George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, from the Foreword
Cover title: The Search for the individual.
This is Dooyeweerd's most accessible work. It provides an understanding of Greek, medieval, and Modern Humanistic life-orientations in their historical development and inter-penetration - throughout confronted with the implications of an integral biblical understanding of the human condition, human society and the place and calling of scholarly reflection. It shows a healthy sense of solidarity and criticism with these various traditions. From a purely historical point of view, Dooyeweerd for example writes, Humanism has done more for the recognition of public freedom for religious convictions than did seventeenth-century Calvinism. Particularly instructive in this work is Dooyeweerd's unveiling of the origin of the modern ideology of community at the beginning of the previous century and its subsequent effects in National-Socialism.
Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric. What makes the West unique? What is the driving force behind its culture? Remi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture. This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure of the contributions of a particular individual, religion, or national tradition. The author's interest is especially, with regard to the transmission of that culture, to articulate the dynamic tension that has propelled Europe and more generally the West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of European culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls "Roman". Yet the author's intent is not to write a history of Europe, and less yet to defend the historical reality of the Roman Empire. Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history or, one might say, cultural myth, of ancient Rome. The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it. Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other. Nowhere does the author find this Roman character so strongly present as in the Christian and particularly Catholic attitude toward the incarnation. At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the sources and their fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the fragility of their nourishing principle. As such, Brague finds in it notonly a means of understanding the past, but of projecting a future in (re)proposing to the West, and to Europe in particular, a model relationship of what is proper to it. An international bestseller (translated from the original French edition of Europe, La Voie Romaine), this work has been or is presently being translated into thirteen languages.
The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.