On America's Vocation
James McCullough Thursday, 1 September 2005
James W. Skillen, With or Against the World?: America's Role Among the Nations, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 208 pp. $24.95.
James W. Skillen's new venture into American foreign policy highlights profound paradoxes that characterize the nation and its history. The United States, perhaps unlike any other nation on earth, was uniquely born of the confluence of genuinely spiritual aspirations, philosophical ideas, and human entrepreneurship. It is, as he repeats throughout, a nation founded upon Puritan Protestantism, Enlightenment ideals, and frontier-style pioneerism. Predicated upon its belief in its own exceptionalism—a sense of distinction from the rest of the world—the United States is a "civil-religious dynamo imbued with a world-historical mission" (p. x).
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