Readers, respect not the friends, critics, or even the judgments of posterity that insist on a book’s greatness. Enjoy what you read, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, stop, close the book, and go read something else.
If anyone older than Homer used the bird’s nest motif in a figurative sense, I have been unable to find it. His evocative imagery may seem familiar to modern readers, but this is deceptive insofar as it makes us think of the changes on the horizon for the parents whose primary child-rearing responsibilities are complete.
It is time—indeed, past time—to act decisively. Ukraine is our neighbor. Will Russia, with her imperial designs and commitment to do the unthinkable, be deterred? Are we in the West willing to confront sociopolitical evil? And do so in the name of justice, charity, and human dignity?
Popular culture tells us it is often more efficient to outsource routine household tasks than do them yourself. This leaves an important question unanswered, however: efficient at what?
Conservatives, who sometimes can be seen as wanting to turn the clock much farther back than the last decade, will need to identify ways of applying core principles in ways that avoid falling into sheer revanchism. Old-fashioned liberals who wish to recover a circa 2013 version of the Democratic Party will have to lay out what, exactly, they would change to prevent the same cultural trends from playing out all over again.
The law is a teacher, and so is social experience. A society in which abortion is not only legal, but common and easily available, teaches people to regard it as not a big deal. In contrast, restricting abortion sends the message that it is, at the least, a serious matter.
Human flourishing does not require escaping the cares and travails of this world, but rather, it imbues them with significance in the light of the Eternal One, in whom we live and move and have our being.
It’s useful to heed the words of Gabriel Marcel when it comes to desire. To paraphrase his “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived,” perhaps we could instead say: “Desire is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.” Girard himself refers to desire as a “mystery” on numerous occasions. I think he spent his entire life trying to understand that mystery.
That is the trap of busyness: believing that the busyness itself is what matters, instead of placing all our work and all our rest at the feet of our maker. That is the trap that the addiction to busyness in our culture lays for us. That is the trap that we ought to resist.
If local politicians expect to be reelected, they have to focus on solving problems that are immediately relevant to their communities and the real people who live in them.
Alicea repeats often and correctly the age-old insight that responsibility to care for the common good belongs to each member of the political community. But an equal sharing of authority does not follow from that shared responsibility, and no account of the Constitution’s moral authority will succeed if it presumes otherwise.
The stronger the truth the Left seeks to counteract, and the more irrational the fantasy it promotes, the larger and stronger the government it requires. Whether it will achieve its ends remains to be seen.
Tom Holland raises many important questions about the connection between Christianity and contemporary Western civilization. All Westerners, be they Christian or not, would do well to consider his insights.
People have a right to protest supposed electoral fraud even if they are obviously and verifiably wrong. They do not have the right to commit violence. No one has the right to commit violence in a political cause. But not all political violence is insurrection.
As this idea of self-creation, telling our own story, self-determination has become seen as the fundamental element of human life, that means those of us who participate more fully in self-creation are more human, and those of us who participate less fully are, in some sense, less human.
Approaching conversations about the mental load with gratitude rather than resentment is the first step toward a more joyful home. Even if we want our spouse to take more responsibility, we can begin by thanking him for the things we see him do. We can discuss what’s going on beneath the surface when something feels amiss. And we can apologize for, and seek to change, our own selfishness, no matter how it manifests.
Welcoming human imperfection in its manifold expressions is a boon for those of us who lack the privilege of full-time scholarship. It is not in spite of, but thanks to, the inherent inefficiencies of our rich and often chaotic lives that so many of us can enjoy the pursuit of intellectual enrichment.
The primordial failing of the UN Declaration’s proponents was that they drank too deeply from the well of postwar optimism. While they were rightly horrified by the brutality of the Second World War, they rebuilt neither with a tragic sense nor with due attentiveness to human limitations. Instead, they rebuilt with comic ambitions.
In one respect, Prior’s effort is to repristinate evangelicalism by disentangling the elements of the evangelical social imaginary “that are truly Christian” so they “can be better distinguished from those that are merely cultural.” Such an effort requires momentarily escaping the blindfold of the metaphors, stories, and images that mold our pre-cognitive intuitions and dispositions in order to see what is real.
The silent disappearance of the presidential bioethics council breaks fifty years of tradition. Sadly, this break came at a perilous time for bioethics.
There is no romance without the real presence of God, no sacramental imagination without the sacraments, and the wonders of fantasy cannot be asserted of primary reality itself.
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