: re: The Enlightenment Project

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 7:21 AM
Subject: re: The Enlightenment Project
To: letters@forward.com

To the Editor:

  David Brooks seems to resent the Enlightenment for challenging his smug messianic telos.  But the nostalgia he's peddling is a sham; the world of the shtetl was objectively awful. It is the Enlightenment, and the separation of Church from State that permitted the invention of the modern world. Meaning is the mission of the Church, not of our government.
     What is great in America is the embodiment of the Enlightenment. The United States of America is not separable from it.

Barry Haskell Levine

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/opinion/the-enlightenment-project.html