Why do Europeans and Americans see the world so differently? Why do Europeans and Americans have such different understandings of democracy and its discontents in the twenty-first century? Why is Europe dying, demographically? In The Cube and the Cathedral, George Weigel offers a critique of "Europe's problem" and draws out its lessons for the rest of the democratic world. Contrasting the civilization that produced the starkly modernist "cube" of the Great Arch of Le Defence in Paris with the civilization that produced the "cathedral," Notre-Dame, Weigel argues that Europe's embrace of a narrow and cramped secularism has led a crisis of civilizational morale that is eroding Europe's soul and failing to create the European future. Weigel traces the origins of "Europe's problem" to the "drama of atheistic humanism in nineteenth century European intellectual life. Europe's cultural leaders thought that jettisoning the God of the Bible was necessary for human liberation. What they in fact set in motion was a historical process that eventually 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. The profound question raised for the United States and every other democracy by "Europe's problem" is whether there can be any true "politics" - any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedom - without God. George Weigel makes a case that the answer is "No" - because, in the final analysis, societies and cultures are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.