[NOTE: This event will appear on C-SPAN2's "Book TV" on Sunday, June 19th. Click here for details or to watch online.]

In his new book, The Cube and the Cathedral, George 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.

Mr. Weigel discussed his new book and its arguments in an evening lecture at EPPC. In addition, Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post offered her commentary and insights on Mr. Weigel's book and his presentation. Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. A graduate of Yale and a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, she has worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the London Spectator, as the Warsaw correspondent for The Economist, and as a columnist for the online magazine, Slate, as well as several British newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. Her work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. Her most recent book, Gulag: A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer prize for non-fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the L.A. Times book award.