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.
Currently reading: A Spirituality of Fundraising (Henri Nouwen Spirituality) by Henri J.M. Nouwen 📚
Modern society has achieved unprecedented rates of formal literacy, but at the same time it has produced new forms of illiteracy. People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of their country’s history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary written texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights. The conversion of popular traditions of self-reliance into esoteric knowledge administered by experts encourages a belief that ordinary competence in almost any field, even the art of self-government, lies beyond reach of the layman.
C. S. Lewis, replying to the charge that he doesn’t ‘care much for’ the Sermon on the Mount:
As to ‘caring for’ the Sermon on the Mount, if ‘caring for’ here means ‘liking’ or enjoying, I suppose no one ‘cares for’ it. Who can like being knocked flat on his face by a sledge-hammer? I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of the man who can read that passage with tranquil pleasure. This is indeed to be ‘at ease in Zion’. Such a man is not yet ripe for the Bible.
The White Bridge (c. 1875-1890) by John Henry Twachtman:
Wild Cherry Tree (c. 1901) by John Henry Twachtman:
In all true Christian asceticism, [there is] respect for the thing rejected which, I think, we never find in pagan asceticism. Marriage is good, though not for me; wine is good, though I must not drink it; feasts are good, though today we fast.
