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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rod Dreher
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July 19 - July 27, 2018
And established Christian schools may not be sufficiently orthodox, academically challenging, or morally sound. A tight communal network generates the social capital needed to launch a school, or to reform and revive an existing one.
very good points
to reknit the bonds between Czechs and their past severed by the Communists.
the erasure of memory Milan Kundera The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Poland, with its thick Catholic culture, came much closer than the Czechs to realizing a parallel polis.
Rather than letting their children spend forty hours a week learning “facts” with a few hours of worldview education slapped
on top, parents need to pull them from public schools and provide them with an education that is rightly ordered—that is, one based on the premise that there is a God-given, unified structure to reality and that it is discoverable. They need to teach them Scripture and history.
Every educational model presupposes an anthropology: an idea of what a human being is. In general, the mainstream model is geared toward equipping students to succeed in the workforce, to provide a pleasant, secure life for themselves and their future families, and ideally, to fulfill their personal goals—whatever those goals might be. The standard Christian educational model today takes this model and adds religion classes and prayer services.
To be humanized is to grow—by contemplation and action, and through faith and reason—in the love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These are all reflections of the Triune God, in Whom we live and move and have our being.
Since the High Middle Ages, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has been slowly separated from the pursuit of virtue. Today the break is clean.
They’ve had it drummed into their heads that Catholicism is anything they want it to be.”
After all, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism comes from somewhere.
I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare.
“The Lost Tools of Learning” (the founding document of the current classical education movement), corresponds to the mental capacities of young people at certain ages of development.
Beyond the local level, Communion and Liberation (CL), a global Catholic movement based in Italy, manages the Company of Works, a
nationwide Italian network of small and medium-size business, charities, and nonprofit organizations. They are all run by CL members and dedicated to cooperation for the sake of living out Catholic principles in economic life. Leaders in orthodox Christian life in the United States should consider forming a similar association of businesses, for the sake of mutual support and collaboration.
We can start by thinking of our work as a calling, as a vocation in the older sense: a way of life given to us by God for His own glory and for the common good.
None of these strategies will work, however, unless Christians think radically different about the two most powerful forces shaping and driving modern life: sex and technology.
As Wendell Berry puts it, “The point about temperance, including sexual discipline, is not that it reduces pleasure, but that it safeguards abundance.”1
It was the countercultural force of Christian sexuality that overturned the pagan world’s dehumanizing practices. Christianity taught that the body is sacred and that the dignity possessed by all humans as made in the image of God required treating it as such.
In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly
Chastity—the rightly ordered use of the gift of sexuality—was the greatest distinction setting Christians of the early church apart from the pagan world.4
In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early church’s.
Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not only come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology.
The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle
of an order created and imbued with m...
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Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.
Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.
We have gay marriage because the straight majority came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression and only secondarily for procreation. We have gay marriage because the straight majority, in turn, came to see marriage in the same way—and two generations of Americans have grown up with these nominalist values on sex and marriage as normative.
Genesis tells us that from the very beginning, masculinity, femininity, and sex are created by God and bound to Creation. Man and woman become “one flesh,” though remaining fully themselves, because this is how God regards the nature of the bond between Himself and each person.
Beauty and goodness, embodied in great art and fiction, and in the lives of ordinary Christians, married and single, is the only thing that stands a chance.
A terrific resource for families is The Humanum Series, six short movies, all available for free on YouTube, presenting the traditional Christian vision of sex, gender, marriage, and family.
What is Hanby getting at? For thousands of years humans have used tools to affect their environment. What gave birth to technology as a comprehensive worldview was the sense, beginning with nominalism and emerging in the early modern era, that nature had no intrinsic meaning. It’s just stuff.
The seed that was planted in the fourteenth century with the triumph of nominalism reaches its full ripeness in Technological Man.
The Internet rapidly accelerates the political, social, and cultural fragmentation process that has been under way since the mid-twentieth century and profoundly compromises our ability to pay attention.
But the Internet, like all new technologies, also takes away. What it takes from us is our sense of agency.
This is why medieval Christendom was filled with prayers, rituals, fasts, and feasts: to keep life, both public and private, ordered around things divine.10
Developing the cognitive control that leads to a more contemplative Christian life is the key to living as free men and women in post-Christian America.
authentic Christianity has been taken over by a parasitical form of spirituality called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,
I have attempted to sound the alarm for conservative Christians in the West, warning them that the greatest danger we face today does not come from aggressive
left-wing politics or radical Islam, as many seem to think.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines,” writes Wendell Berry. Let’s take our stand on the side of creatures, and the Creator.
