Is there a fate worse than condemnation?
Yes, say Allen Guelzo and James Hankins in their new textbook, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition: Volume II: The Modern and Contemporary West. Worse than everyone hating you is no one remembering you.
Right now for Western civilization, the former is leading to the latter. Having been widely condemned as oppressive, imperialist, colonizing, and appropriating, Western civilization is sometimes not even taught, let alone celebrated for producing the moral, technological, political, economic, and lifestyle achievements that give shape to our world. The Golden Thread helps in remembering and teaching without ignoring the failures and shortcomings of Western civilization.
The textbook collaborators Guelzo and Hankins have been acquainted for more than 50 years. Hankins wrote volume one, and Guelzo has written volume two. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and director of the James Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship at Princeton University. Guelzo is a long-time favorite writer of mine, not least for his work on the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, for which he last appeared on Gospelbound in 2024. I’m honored to host him again as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, one of the hinge points in Western civilization in that memorable year of 1776.
In This Episode:
00:00 – Why Western civilization slips away when taken for granted
00:25 – Introducing Allen Guelzo and The Golden Thread
02:24 – How should we define Western civilization?
08:02 – The fall of communism and the West’s crisis of confidence
11:23 – China, radical Islam, Russia, and civilizational conflict
12:47 – Self-criticism as the West’s strength and danger
15:38 – World wars, Darwin, Freud, communism, and lost confidence
19:49 – The atomic age and the misuse of scientific achievement
22:09 – Defending the West without triumphalism
25:38 – Winston Churchill, trauma, and Christian civilization
30:15 – Adenauer, de Gaulle, and rebuilding Europe after 1945
32:38 – Strange defeat, German memory, and Russia’s missed moment
38:37 – C. S. Lewis, John Paul II, and Christianity in a skeptical age
39:28 – Contingency, crisis, and the decisions that shape history
42:24 – Christianity, Greece, Rome, and the “layer cake” of the West
51:33 – Technology, memory, and the future of civilization
53:39 – Lincoln, King, Augustine, and recovering the tradition
58:17 – Could artificial intelligence revive classical education?
59:37 – Closing encouragement
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