Dr Kevin Donnelly AM is an Australian educator, author and commentator, and Senior Fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s PM Glynn Institute. He is also — as Peta Credlin once described him — one of “Australia’s foremost culture war warriors.”
Donnelly fights the good fight with his keyboard, producing an enviable bounty of straight-talking books, with titles that put you in absolutely no doubt about what he thinks, such as; How Political Correctness is Destroying Australia (2018); Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March (2021), The Dictionary of Woke: How Orwellian Language Control and Group Think Are Destroying Western Societies (2022).
Dr Donnelly’s newest anthology is similarly unambiguous: Defend The West; The Culture of Freedom.
With a foreword by Toby Young (director of the Free Speech union and associate editor of The Spectator) and an introduction by Dr Donnelly himself, the various contributors each add to the book’s overarching theme that rather than practicing self-flagellation over our role in Western culture, we should be rightly celebrating it.
The first chapter sees Dr Paul Morrisey exploring the origins and nature of Western culture:
“Ancient Rome builds upon and develops the great contribution of the Greeks, but the other founder of Western culture is Israel, and with the coming of Christ, Christianity. This contribution is not philosophical as such, but prophetic and religious. Alone among the ancient world, Israel worships one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. A God that elects a particular people but is always understood and worshipped as the one true God of all creation, of all peoples and all times.
If we use the analogy of marriage, the West is born from a union between Greece (Rome) and Israel (Jews/Christians). This marriage was not without friction, and required centuries of forging, but its fruitfulness is undeniable. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” so asked (rhetorically) the 2nd century theologian, Tertullian.
It is a question that has lain at the heart of Western Civilisation even before it was first explicitly uttered. Tertullian was in the minority of the Church Fathers in arguing that Greek and Roman wisdom was irrelevant to Christian revelation. St Augustine, perhaps the greatest Christian classicist, argued strongly for the inherent relationship between Judeo-Christianity (Jerusalem) and Classical culture (Athens). In Book VII of his Confessions, Augustine writes of how the philosophy of Plato opened his mind and heart to help him accept the truths of Christianity.”
In the following chapters, Colin Black looks at the benefits of a liberal education, Dr Augusto Zimmerman writes about the rule of law, and Anna Krohn argues for religion and how “Christian imagination and ethical thinking is personalist and crucial to a civilisation which aims to build a common good around the universals of human dignity, reason, life and creativity.”
Other contributors include A Gibson, Gerard Holland, Kenneth (Diff) Crowther, and Dr Anthony Dillon.
The anthology’s concluding chapter is Dr Fiona Mueller’s Why There is Cause of Optimism. She decides that “while it may sound counter-intuitive, Australia’s growing scepticism of governments and other decision-making bodies may also be the greatest cause of optimism.”
Dr Donnelly’s book is a clarion call to anyone who values the culture of freedom.
Available at kevindonnelly.com.au.
