Western Civilization

We need to become outposts of intellectual seriousness and Christian virtue and moral sanity that expose the darkness of our generation.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine helped the West remember that it is fortified by a shared love of peace.

Tom Holland, author of the recently published “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” has done a great service to current discussions on the relationship between Christianity and Western civilization.

Perhaps one of my favorite tools in teaching Western civilization to undergrads at Arizona State University is to show clips…

The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, by Ben Shapiro (Broadside, 2019). This…

This article about the history and future of Christian moral truth was originally published in Christianity and Crisis on December 28th, 1942. Contributor Barbara Ward details the history of Christian moral law, originally developed in the philosophical depths of the natural law tradition, all the way to its fracturing, resulting in the contemporaneous “will to power” found in Nazism. She councils Christians globally to recover this tradition and bring it to bear on the world in her day.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s Protestant rectitude informs his sense of America’s dutiful vocation in the world premised on: “Liberty, equality, and human dignity.”

Even if Christians will not acknowledge the West as their own, the West is inextricably woven into the church’s eternal story, with glorious chapters yet unwritten. Christian leaders, ecclesial and intellectual, should step forward into their responsibility for leadership and stewardship of the West. Contrary to despairing conventional wisdom, it’s not too late.

Truths about human rights have, indeed, been discovered in the West, but are not the property of the West and do not apply only in the West. But Trump implied that these were simply local, particular, and culturally-specific “values.”