George Weigel's Call to Action

George Weigel, biographer of John Paul II, has a new book entitled Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism. Here's an excerpt:

It is, perhaps, ironic that, at precisely the moment when a religiously grounded, existential threat to the civilization of the West (Islam) has manifested itself with real power, a new atheism, dripping with disdain for traditional religious conviction, has risen up in the form of broadsides by bestselling polemicists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. Yet contrary to the claims of these new atheists and their call to the "maturity" of unbelief, a West that has lost the ability to think in terms of "God" and "Satan" and that has forgotten the drama contained in the idea of "redemption," is a West that will be at a loss to recognize what inspires and empowers those enemies of the West who showed their bloody hand on September 11, 2001. A West that does not take religious ideas seriously as a dynamic force in the world's unfolding history is a West that will have disarmed itself, conceptually and imaginatively in the midst of war.