The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

I've been reading America's Secular Challenge by NYU professor and president of the Hudson Institute Herb London.  The book is essentially an extended essay about how elite, left-wing secularism undercuts America's traditional strengths of patriotism and religious faith during a time when the nation can ill afford it.  The assault on public religion and love of country comes in a period when America faces enemies who have no such crisis of identity and lack the degree of doubt that leaves us in semi-paralysis. 

The best compliment I can pay the book (by a Jewish social critic) is that it reminds me of the outstanding work of John Courtenay Murray (the great Catholic church and state scholar) who wrote:

And if this country is to be overthrown from within or without, I would suggest that it will not be overthrown by Communism.  It will be overthrown because it will have made an impossible experiment.  It will have undertaken to establish a technological order of most marvelous intricacy, which will have been constructed and will operate without relations to true political ends: and this technological order will hang, as it were, suspended over a moral confusion; and this moral confusion will itself be suspended over a spiritual vacuum.

topics:
Religion