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| Arizona snow storm incident March, 2023 |
Frank Doyle SJ
Wednesday, 8 March 2023
Why human arrogance?
Tuesday, 7 March 2023
Gender ideology runs into reality
Here are useful resources for those seeking clarity as to why gender ideology is so catastrophic for society's well-being:
Organizations that count
Don Quixote at death’s door
Tuesday, 28 February 2023
Writer takes delight in her close family
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| Sarah Standing, whose illness revealed the riches of her life |
Salve for these wounds inflicted on the social body comes in the form of the evidence around us of parents boldly meeting the challenges of raising children, and of family members responding with devotion to the needs of each other.
A British writer who was diagnosed with cancer has written a book detailing her treatment, but going to some length to highlight how her family — husband, children, grandchildren, and mother — played important roles in her recovery. The writer, Sarah Standing, was 61 when she was found to have cancer. Her book is Dancing With The Red Devil: A Memoir Of Love, Hope, Family And Cancer.
The medical care was one thing, but her experience of living through a time of desperate need has opened her eyes to what the loners by choice will never be able to enjoy.
But I have learned things — big things. I always slightly mocked the trend for being grateful for everything, from a cup of coffee to a sunrise, but now I get it. I’m grateful. When I first got ill, I harboured such grand ideas about what I’d do if — no, scratch that, when — I recovered. But how quickly I’ve become indifferent to all the things I thought I wanted.
I fantasised about fancy family holidays in the Maldives, and big adventures. I projected myself forward into an imagined new lifestyle, one that bore no resemblance to the life I’d put on hold, only to realise I already had everything I ever wanted. The only thing that mattered was to release my children and husband from the tyranny of having to worry about me.
Now I have it back — that old, wonderful life — I see more clearly than ever that family is everything. More curative, more potent, than any drug they hit you with.
Standing elaborates on how each member of her family contributed to her recovery through their attention to her and their willingness to engage in her battle against cancer. Then she declares:
The truth is, it’s my family who carry the burden of my illness. For 14 months of treatment, I do exist in a sort of survival trance of denial, while they deal every day with the severity of my situation. And when the PET scan comes back clear at the end of that time, at last I can see just how they’ve held me up, kept me going, understood how much danger I was in, when I didn’t.
The antagonism toward the family more frequently expressed is disturbing to those who have the welfare of a future-focused society at heart. An example is a skit, here, by Chelsea Handler, an American comedian and TV celebrity.
A BBC feature highlights the social stigma related to childlessness. Clearly, society's disapproval of those who desire to be "free" to live their life without the restraints that child-rearing demands is a form of self-protection for the fundamental unit of society. Secondly, the projected disgrace is to de-incentivise anyone from withdrawing from the linkages of mutual support that produce a healthy community.
From this second BBC feature we see the new set of values influencing those of the child-bearing generation to limit family size to the minimum.
We know from experience past and present that a weakening of family bonds causes confusion in the young and delinquency.
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A E Casey Foundation
Child Well-Being in Single-Parent Families
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Monday, 20 February 2023
God's love is weird, lunacy, a little crazy
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| From photo by Elīna Arāja |
Here’s a key now to reading the Sermon on the Mount: we can’t read it as just one sort of moral philosophy among many. So, everyone from Plato and Aristotle all the way up through Kant and Hegel and John Dewey has a moral philosophy—here’s our understanding of how humans ought to behave. Or they have a political philosophy—here’s the way we think society ought to be organized.That’s true, again, from Plato through Karl Marx and everybody in between. And they say, well, here’s Jesus’ ethical teaching, here’s Jesus’ political philosophy. That’s precisely the wrong way to read it.
Barron then stresses the distinction that has to be made between all the crowd of moral philosophers and political theorists and Jesus in the moral challenges thrown down:
[The] one thing you’ll notice is no one sounds like Jesus. [...] Jesus, in fact, sounds a little bit crazy. Name another moral philosopher who says, “I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil.”
“Anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand over your cloak as well.” This sounds like lunacy. And then, to press it, “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies.”
Jesus "is not trading in ordinary moral thought here":
It’s something qualitatively different. What’s the key? [...] “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
What he’s interested in is divinization, that we become conformed to God’s way of being. The Church Fathers said “Deus fit homo ut homo fieret Deus”—God became man that we might become God. An extraordinary claim that goes right back to the earliest of the Church Fathers. The purpose of the Incarnation? God becomes one of us that human nature might be lifted up to share in God’s own life.
"Okay, if that’s the game," says Barron, then we need to know what God is like:
But God is not a being in the world. God is the creative ground of all that exists. God is the unmoved mover. He’s the un-caused cause. That means his love is not predicated upon some cause extraneous to itself. I will love you because..., I will love you in the measure that..., I will love you under these conditions. Well, that’s how we creatures love each other, but that’s not how God operates.
God is love, we hear; that’s all he knows how to do. He doesn’t play the game of conditioned love, love parceled out, love in bits and pieces, my love if you love me. And we are meant to be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect.
"Turn the other cheek", "If someone demands that you carry their load for one mile, carry it for two miles". These are hard sayings because it is not what our instincts tell us. But, Barron stresses:
It’s being said to us by the Son of God, who wants us not just to be just in some ordinary human sense. He wants us to be perfect, as the heavenly Father is perfect, the one who makes his sun to shine on the good and the bad alike.
Unconditional love: go to the video of Bishop Barron's homily for his insights in full into what Christ is asking of us ‒ to love as God loves.
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Tuesday, 14 February 2023
Small. Helpless. Why not get rid of it?
A Modest Proposal
For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland,
from being a burden on their parents or country,
and for making them beneficial to the publick.
By Dr. Jonathan Swift
1729
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Down the rabbit hole of self-absorption
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| Anna Tarazevich |
The individualism of the Renaissance, the dismemberment of man and his relations in the age of Enlightenment, and finally the subjective idealism of Kant, whereby our minds were taught to relinquish the objective thing, the trans-subjective reality, and to indulge in boundless subjectivism: these influences tore us from the moorings of our being. . . . We became imprisoned within the walls of our own selves. . . . The category “humanity” became foreign to our thought, and we thought and lived only in the category of self.
— German scholar Karl Adam (1875–1966) Source
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