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  "path": "/2026/06/for-western-civilization-allen-guelzo-james-hankins-ask-where-next/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-17T23:02:52.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
  "tags": [
    "Book Review",
    "Church History",
    "Civilization",
    "The Latest",
    "border on meaningless"
  ],
  "textContent": "Roger Kimball has assembled ten essays from _The New Criterion_ where he serves as editor, centered upon Western civilization’s great dilemma: _Where Next?_ The volume’s introduction notes that it serves as a memorial against the cultural amnesia that precedes civilizational decay. Inevitably, such a question requires a look at where the West has been. Here, however, the book is lacking. While several authors do make appeals to the past, with Andrew Roberts’s contribution rewriting American history as a John Bunyan-like dream, these appeals are limited. As Michael Anton notes in his essay, the term “crossroads” implies a map, and while the book is centered upon the present debates, few of the writers appeal to the riches of Western history beyond the standard example of the fall of Rome. Since Kimball offers this volume as a rebuttal to the onset of widespread cultural amnesia, the arguments found in the book would be strengthened by appeals to previous crossroads throughout the Western tradition. There are numerous events that shaped the West, such as the responses to 7th and 8th centuries Islamic conquests, the Great Schism between the churches of the East and West, the fall of Constantinople, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Revolution and Romanticism, and the World Wars of the 20th century; yet these are hardly referenced.\n\nKimball mentions in his essay Arnold Toynbee’s argument of the “barbarization of the dominant minority.” Allen Guelzo and James Hankins state in their essay “Civilization & Tradition” a similar observation that barbarism is a threat to civilization, and this threat often comes from within. While there is soundness in such statements, Kimball fairly notes that one of the West’s distinctive features is its dynamism. The Western tradition has at times rejected ideas that later became integral to the Western tradition. The Enlightenment sought Greek and Roman antiquity while despising the preceding age of Medieval Christendom. Or consider the ever-cursed Karl Marx and his clear anti-Western writings that found their initial influence in the writings of the established Western philosopher Georg F.W. Hegel.\n\nKimball’s shorthand definition of the “West” as “Christendom,” while concise, is limited. He sharpens this definition as a dispensation in which individuals possess an “intrinsic moral worth.” Indeed, this flows throughout Western thought from the Greeks and Christianity, but the West has not always intrinsic moral worth at times. Even at its height and most united, Christendom has been plagued by division, the term “Christianity” seems to be a better definition but still falls short for defining the West. The power of dynamism in the West can be seen especially throughout the church, as contemporary Christianity, particularly Protestantism, is fractured with many mainline denominations and/or state churches across the US and Europe liberalized by the influence of Western intellectual and philosophical movements. Dynamism offers insight into the Western tradition’s ability to converse within itself and perhaps its greatest feature. Even when its practice falls short of its ideals, it is undergirded with the ability to react and self-correct.\n\nGuelzo and Hankins offer a more complex view by comparing the Western tradition to a great tree with a vast system of roots, stemming from Greek language, literature, history, philosophy, government/law, art, and architecture. Therefore, following their essay, Western civilization and tradition is comprised of an inheritance from the Greeks, Romans, Latin and Medieval Christendom, and Renaissance Europe up to the present day. They reason that to deny such a heritage or to replace Western civilization will accomplish what the “barbarian hordes of ancient and medieval times were unable to accomplish.” Again, this definition must face the history of the Western tradition as each successive age has denied and/or replaced certain aspects of what came before. Early Christianity did not throw away all the Greek and Roman traditions, but they did cleanse a larger portion of those cultures as antithetical to the church. Though the Medieval world did not replace Plato, it did forget many of his works which were not translated into Latin, until the late High Middle Ages saw the fall of Constantinople and refugees from that civilization bringing Greek literature, art, scholarship and the like back into the West.\n\nGreece itself is an interesting note in these discussions of the Western tradition as it is considered the foundation and origins for the West, but also holds much in common with the East, particularly through the continuation of the Byzantine Empire after the fall of the Roman Empire. The boundaries of Western civilization are complicated, which Guelzo and Hankins give notice to through the spread of Western influence to nations not traditionally considered part of the West like Australia and New Zealand, but also Japan and India.\n\nThe Western tradition is a good that must be preserved and handed down. However, this phrase is so capacious as to border on meaningless. The West must remember its past in order to embrace the values which gave rise to the most humane society the world has ever known. Since the book’s publication in 2022, the West has witnessed the reelection of Donald Trump, the aggressive AI boom, the continuation of the Russo-Ukrainian war with no end in sight, the October 7th attack by Hamas against Israel, the assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, and continued US-Israeli conflict with Iran. Given this state of affairs, “Where next?” remains an apt question.",
  "title": "For Western Civilization, Allen Guelzo & James Hankins Ask “Where Next?”"
}