Daniel

“[H]owever dim the recollection of the association may have become in men’s minds, a feast “without gods,” and unrelated to worship, is quite simply unknown. It is true that ever since the French Revolution attempts have been repeatedly made to manufacture feast days and holidays that have no connection with divine worship, or are sometimes even opposed to it: “Brutus days,” or even that hybrid, “Labor Day.” In point of fact the stress and strain of giving them some kind of festal appearance is one of the very best proofs of the significance of divine worship for a feast; and nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“seek to measure my works by its high standard and pass it on to my children with love. The iconoclast—the icon-smasher—is not generally a lover of mankind. Here let me add something that is hard to see when we are thinking only of selves and their survival. It is that the longing to go home, to a real culture, is also a longing not to be alone anymore.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“For example, the hand-held telephone with internet connections allows us to speak easily with people far beyond the distance we can cross by shouting or waving flags or sending smoke signals. But when the use of such telephones shuts down communication with people three feet away from us, then we are talking about a tool whose use—if we do not learn to restrain ourselves—damages the very faculty that it is supposed to assist. It has become a suicide machine. Or if a student’s laptop computer prevents him from acquiring the patience and the mental silence necessary to read a good book, then it is weakening the very faculty for which, presumably, it was adopted in the first place. It too becomes a suicide machine. It will not matter that the computer can place before the student’s eyes many thousands of books he could otherwise never open. He will lack the mental habits to read them.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

“We pray for the conversion of our enemies, but it is also legitimate that we pray for the destruction of those who violently oppose the kingdom of Christ. In this way it is appropriate for God’s people today to use the psalms of imprecation, not for personal revenge, but as part of our prayer for the establishment of the cause of Christ.”
― Sean McGowan, Psalms that Curse: A Brief Primer