In his twelfth William E. Simon Lecture, EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel discusses the thesis of his new book, Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church, with an eye toward addressing some of the challenges presented by our current cultural crises.
The Catholic Church is on the threshold of a bold new era in its two-thousand year history. As the curtain comes down on the Church defined by the 16th-century Counter-Reformation, the curtain is rising on the Evangelical Catholicism of the third millennium: a mission-centered renewal honed by the Second Vatican Council and given compelling expression by Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI; a way of being Catholic, both ancient and new, that offers to the world a deeply humane alternative to the soul-stifling self-absorption of postmodernity, and that challenges deep currents in contemporary American culture.