Heading to Montana in the morning—I have the privilege of teaching a week-long class at MWSB, a school I attended many moons ago. Looking at the ten-day forecast, I see that the weather looks to be fairly mild for MT standards this time of year.

Lewis' essay on the dangers of national repentance was cited regularly a few years ago (and rightly so). But in our current moment, I think his essay “Meditation on the Third Commandment” is especially prescient. His warnings offer much fodder for reflection in light of conversations around post-Liberalism, Integralism, and Christian Nationalism.

Big Brother Playing (1890) by Harriet Backer:

Blue Interior (1883) by Harriet Backer:

Sewing Woman (1890) by Harriet Backer:

Summer Night (1886) by Eilif Peterssen:

Fra Sevilosen ved Savallen (1907) by Eilif Peterssen:

Jane Clark Scharl, from an essay on applying the principle of subsidiary to one’s purchasing:

It’s easy to bewail the rise of Amazon, but Amazon only perfected a process that started long ago. Sears Roebuck did it, but so did the Dutch East India Trading Company. This is the process of drawing commerce away from small local providers and centralizing it around huge suppliers, and more importantly, of pulling money away from local communities and dumping it into the coffers of massive conglomerates. Money is power, and companies like Amazon suck this economic power out of local communities and concentrate it far away. They violate the principle of subsidiarity in a profound way.

It’s certainly true that Amazon has made it possible for us to obtain many goods that would otherwise be unavailable to us. But think about what else has happened because of this: local businesses have shut down, and even where they haven’t, the person-to-person interactions that happen when you go to a physical store are becoming less frequent. We truly do live a world of scarcity – a scarcity of basic human interaction.

Paul Kingsnorth, describing the religious center of civilization and, in the process, highlighting the bankruptcy of modern liberalism:

Every living culture in history, from the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.