“Nothing would count as a fulfillment in a world in which literally nothing is important but self-fulfillment.” —Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self One of the less positive exports of American popular culture is the penchant, especially on the part of the very young (say between the ages of 18 and 30), for a sort…
Continued from Part I. On a more political level there is something even more ominous and troubling than the mere clownings of Berlusconi and the deteriorating moral standards of the country’s elites. It is the phenomenon of the so-called “ronde,’ (a military term suggesting the patrolling of a military police) i.e., self-appointed vigilante groups who…
Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations by Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas, Ashgate, London, 2008; and “A Christian Europe? Europe and Christianity: Rules of Commitment” by JHH Weiler in the journal European View, Vo. 6, n.1, December 2007, Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg. “Advocates of multiple modernities recognize two very simple things: first that…
This past summer, I was in the EU for five weeks, more specifically in Italy. Even in the era of the internet and virtual reality, it seems to me that it remains an undisputed truism that to fully understand a people or a polity one has to first learn the language of those people in…
There can be no science without data on everything we see around us: not just plants and animals, rivers and mountains here below, but also planets and stars up above. All these are part of Nature which includes us too. In our own times, we need specialists to study all of this, and the fruits…
Continued from Christianity: A Private Affair or Part of the European Identity? – Part II Weiler offers some examples which he hopes will motivate the reader to read and reflect on those teachings: the relationship to the “other”–within our society, across our boundaries within Europe, and beyond Europe–is arguably the most important challenge to which…
Continued from Part I. The conundrum here boils down to this: many Catholic scholars have confused the public disciplines of constitutional democracy with a private discipline of religious silence in the public sphere. Worse than that, Christian scholars have internalized the notion that to integrate Christian thinking and Christian teaching into their reflections on constitutional…
In his book A Christian Europe? Europe and Christianity: Rules of Commitment first published in Italy as Un’Europa Cristiana, professor JHH Weiler, of New York University, who has studied the process of European integration for more than twenty-five years, speaks of a European Christian ghetto. Such a provocative statement is of course a mere metaphor…
There is a rather naive notion that the vision of a politically United Europe was born ex nihilo in 1950. The notion is naive because it loses sight of the fact that there is no such thing in history as creations ex nihilo. We stand on the shoulders of giants. It is therefore both proper…
The modern fallacy consists in placing secular as an adjective before humanist as if to imply that to be a humanist one needs to be a secularist inimical to religion which is definitely not the case. It is also not the case that all secularists (what the French and Italians call “laicitË” or “laicit‡”) are…