Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Weigel - An Awakened West

A West that sees in its past nothing but pathology -- racism, colonialism, religious wars and persecutions, sexism, and all the rest -- is a West that cannot and almost certainly will not, defend its present. A West that can't remember its past accurately will not be able to project itself imaginatively into the future. A West that has airbrushed from its collective memory the contributions of biblical religion to its present freedoms is a West that is in a poor position to meet the challenge of a religiously shaped alternative reading of the past, present, and future.

As British philosopher Roger Scruton writes, the West must be able and willing to demonstrate to the rest of the world, and to Muslims who believe that "western success and prosperity [are] ... the products of a purely secular, even atheistic creed," that the greatest achievements of the West are not material but are, rather, "works of spiritual grace and high culture that transmit eternal meanings."

Saying no to moral insouciance, then, means saying no as well to historical amnesia, and no to a crudely secular reading of the roots of the freedom project that is not under assault, and that we must defend.
-- Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, 116-117

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