The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God

George Weigel

ISBN:9780465092666

Why 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? Paris’s modernist La Grande Arche de la Défense and the Gothic Cathedral of Notre-Dame serve as metaphors for papal biographer Weigel’s (Witness to Hope ) examination of what has happened to Europe in the last several decades and its significance to Americans. Weigel, an American Catholic theologian who has lived and worked on the continent, defines the “Europe problem” as the sharp divergence of European views on democracy, the world and politics from those held by Americans like himself.