[Noumenon]

This essay also provides some interesting contect for Lee Harris' The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West. Harris cites what appears to be the impending evaporation of the West's 'civilizational will,' much of which we have squandered in the horrors and atrocities of the last century. In this century, we seem hell-bent on completing the process of suicide by drowning - drowning in our own putrid swamp of self-hatred and political correctness. It's a recipe for civilizational failure. We are certainly not the first, and human nature being what it is, we will not be the last.

[happygrl]

I loved reading Lee Harris when he used to post on Tech Central; I 've heard him on several talk radio shows promoting this book: smart guy.

The "civilizational will" that is evaporating is that residing in Europe.

I think that in the US we still have the essential factor for survival; that is a devotion to Faith and Freedom. Short of a revival of devotion to Christ in Europe, that civilization is, indeed, hurtling toward a horrendous denouement.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins