This volume represents an attempt in integrating a wide range of theoretically relevant issues into the identification and analysis of church-state patterns. Each chapter focuses on the analysis of a particular theme and its role in shaping, and/or being shaped by, church-state relations.

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? Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist "cube" of the Great Arch of La Defense in Paris with the civilization that produced the "cathedral" of Notre-Dame, George Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow secularism has led to a crisis of morale that is eroding Europe's soul and threatening its future -- with dire lessons for the rest of the democratic world. Weigel traces the origins of "Europe's problem" to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War -- and, most ominously, the Continent's de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death. And yet, many Europeans still insist -- most recently, during the debate over a new EU constitution -- that only a public square shorn of religiously-informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite, Weigel suggests, is true: the people of the "cathedral" can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone's freedom; the people of the "cube" cannot. Can there be any true "politics" -- any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedom -- without God? George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is "No," because, in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.

"[...] Spain, not devout at all, but hating things not Catholic because those things are foreign, was more than apart. Britain had long forgotten the unity of Europe. France, a protagonist, was notoriously divided within herself over the religious principle of that unity. No modern religious analysis such as men draw up who think of religion as Opinion will make anything of all this. Then why was there a fight? People who talk of "Democracy" as the issue of the Great War may be neglected: Democracy-one noble, ideal, but rare and perilous, form of human government-was not at stake. No historian can talk thus. The essentially aristocratic policy of England now turned to a plutocracy, the despotism of Russia and [...]."