Mission Critical: James Kalb - "We need to offer, as the old slogan goes, a choice and not an echo."
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| Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament - Our Lady of Walsingham Cathedral, Houston, TX |
A world made up of neutral technologically rational institutions may seem a bad place to look for such things (as ideals of life), but they are always present.
The quickest way to understand ideals of life is to look at people’s points of pride. Pride can be burned away by love of God and neighbor, or of the Good, Beautiful, and True. However, its role in human life is not altogether negative. Not everyone is a saint or sage, and for those who aren’t proper pride is part of self-respect and an essential motive for good behavior.
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People want to distinguish themselves because they want to be something definite, and they want the self-respect that comes from living up to a legitimate ideal. But in a world ordered by technocratic institutions the only way to do that is to distinguish ourselves professionally, though the perceptiveness of our consumption choices, and through our devotion to “equality”—that is, to diminishing the importance of other goals and connections and confronting people who think they matter.
All this is absurdly inhuman and unfulfilling as an ideal of life. This is one reason there’s so much ill humor today: people try hard to do and be what they think right, but when they succeed they find they don’t much like it. And therein lies a lesson. For the past half-century and more the Church has tried to evangelize modern man through sympathy with his projects and aspirations. This no longer makes sense if it ever did. We need to offer, as the old slogan goes, a choice and not an echo.
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PSALM 37
Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right : for that shall bring a man peace at the last.
POPE LEO XIV
The right to freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, and even the right to life are being restricted in the name of other so-called new rights, with the result that the very framework of human rights is losing its vitality and creating space for force and oppression. This occurs when each right becomes self-referential, and especially when it becomes disconnected from reality, nature, and truth.
ST AUGUSTINE
The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.
SAINT PHILIP NERI
The greatness of our love of God must be tested by the desire we have of suffering for His love.
ANTONIN SCALIA
Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility. Liberal Education makes the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life. These are the natural qualities of a large knowledge, they are the objects of a university. But they are no guarantee for sanctity of even for conscientiousness; they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless.
MARCUS AURELIUS
There is but one thing of real value - to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.
MARK TWAIN
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
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