WELL, THAT 20TH CENTURY EXPERIMENT WITH SECULARISM CERTAINLY DIDN'T WORK OUT:

Germans reconsider religion: Pope Benedict XVI's challenge to secularism meets with receptivity during his German visit (Christa Case, 9/15/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

[George Weigel, an American biographer of Pope John Paul II, and the author of "The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God"] points to the recent shift of Jürgen Habermas, one of Germany's foremost philosophers, as evidence of the potential for a rethinking of the public role of religion. A professed secularist who has spent nearly half a century arguing against religiously informed moral argument, he made some arresting statements in his 2004 essay, "A Time of Transition."

"Christianity, and nothing else," he wrote, "is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

The question isn't so much whether they can recognize that they've made a horrible mistake, but whether they can go backwards.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2006 9:10 AM