Here's an excellent and well-written piece from the City Journal that describes the necessity of the Christian virtues of forgiveness and irony to "fill up" citizenship with meaning. The author contrasts these "virtues" with the culture of repudiation that has driven them from the public square and with existential threat posed by a "terrorism" which has as its target concepts abstracted from its victims.
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_the-west.htmlHere are the essay's concluding paragraph's:
What, then, should our stance be in this existential confrontation? I think we should emphasize the very great virtues and achievements that we have built on our legacy of tolerance and show a willingness to criticize and amend all the vices to which it has also given undue space. We should resurrect Locke’s distinction between liberty and license and make it absolutely clear to our children that liberty is a form of order, not a license for anarchy and self-indulgence. We should cease to mock the things that mattered to our parents and grandparents, and we should be proud of what they achieved. This is not arrogance but a just recognition of our privileges.
We should also drop all the multicultural waffling that has so confused public life in the West and reaffirm the core idea of social membership in the Western tradition, which is the idea of citizenship. By sending out the message that we believe in what we have, are prepared to share it, but are not prepared to see it destroyed, we do the only thing that we can do to defuse the current conflict. Because forgiveness is at the heart of our culture, this message ought surely to be enough, even if we proclaim it in a spirit of irony.
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