I’m on a brief trip, and grabbed two books to bring with. Tough task, given the depth and breadth of my backup reading list and the library already spilling over to piles on the office floor….

So I’m looking at Dr. Peter Kreeft’s How To Win the Culture War for the first time in the past one to two years, seeing what I highlighted last time (geesh….the luxury of reading a book straight through within a few days, start to finish, without losing train of thought).

It struck me that right up front, one of the things he mentioned is that our Constitution guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness….and being Kreeft, of course he prodded our consciences on what what means.

From the book:

“One-third of all American children are killed - by their mothers, before they can be born, using healers as hit men.

“This is a happy country? This is peace?

“I know of a doctor who spent two years in the Congo winning the confidence of a dying tribe who would not trust outsiders (black or white) and who were dying because of their bad diet. He was a dietitian, and he saved their lives. Once they knew this, they trusted him totally and asked him all sorts of questions about life in the West. They believed all the amaizng things he told them, like flying to the moon and destroying whole cites with one bomb, but there were two things they literally could not believe.

“One was that in the West there are atheists - people who believe in no gods at all. (”Are these people blind and deaf? Have they never seen a leaf or heard a waterfall?”) The other was that in one nation alone (America), over a million mothers each year pay doctors to kill their babies before they are born. Their reaction to this was to giggle, which was their embarrassed way of trying to be polite, assuming it was a joke. They simply had no holding place in their minds for this concept, and they expected every day that the doctor would tell them the point of the joke.

“And it is we who call these people ‘primitive.’ The irony is mountainous.

“Mother Teresa said, simply (everything she said, she said simply,), ‘When a mother can kill her baby, what is left of civilization to save.?” Chuck Colson has said that a ‘new Dark Ages’ is looming.”

We were warned, notes Kreeft.

Just a partial list: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age. Spengler, 85 years ago, in The Decline of the West. Chesterton, who wrote 75 years ago that ‘the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially sexual morality…The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but in Manhattan.’ Huxley, 65 years ago, in Brave New World…

Speaking of which…..The Manhattan Declaration is the frontline in the current culture war.