Another Great Nation & the Future of This One

A special double-feature today in “On the Square.” First, David Hart presents an even more provocative argument than usual in The Greatest Nation on Earth .  It is not America for, he writes, “I was not really raised with any firm sense of being an American; it was not part of my family mythology.” It is a country you will not expect.

And second, the Archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput, explores the effect of “One of the key myths of the American Catholic imagination,” that “After 200 years of fighting against public prejudice, Catholics finally broke through into America’s mainstream with the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy as president.” In Catholics and the Next America , he writes that this myth has prevented us (and “us” here would include Protestants and Orthodox) from seeing that in the near future we “will likely find it harder , not easier, to influence the course of American culture, or even to live [our] faith authentically.”