TTF Staff
Philip Jenkins, Foreign Policy
“In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf—smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.”
Faiths and Worldviews, Global Culture, Public Square, Tue 12 Jun 2007
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Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
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The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It by Os Guinness.
A proposal for restoring civility in America as a way to foster civility around the world.
What makes a supervillain?: “We’ve exposed all the stories we know as a culture to several peanut-butter-thick layers of ironic reimagining by now, parodying and re-parodying them until there’s nothing left to appreciate with any sincerity, but rather with a smirk and a knowing grin. So how, I wonder, does this culture manufacture more sincerity? How do we create something new that isn’t a parody of something we saw as kids?” (Brian Tiemann, Peeve Farm, on Joss Whedon’s excellent Internet-based musical, Dr. Horrible. • 2008 07 19)
Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo: “Dear friends, life is not governed by chance; it is not random. Your very existence has been willed by God, blessed and given a purpose (cf. Gen 1:28)! Life is not just a succession of events or experiences, helpful though many of them are. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this - in truth, in goodness, and in beauty - that we find happiness and joy. Do not be fooled by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth.” (Pope Benedict XVI, The Catholic Herald • 2008 07 17)
Hollywood’s Hero Deficit: “Though the antihero whose flowering we have seen in our own time was there in embryo, it still left open the possibility of goodness and decency, not just on the part of individuals but of a community. That’s what it took for Dan Evans in the 1957 version of “3:10 to Yuma” to be a hero: the idea that his courage was for the sake of a belief that “people should be able to live in peace and decency together.” Without this belief in a community where power is not antithetical to the good and the decent but the means of its advancement, neither the war films nor the Westerns of our own time will ever be able to give us any but a debased sort of heroism.” (James Bowman, The American • 2008 07 17)
The Return of Religion: “So who, in this subliminal contest, is the truly reasonable one? The atheists beg the question in their own favour, by assuming that science has all the answers. But science can have all the answers only if it has all the questions; and that assumption is false. There are questions addressed to reason which are not addressed to science, since they are not asking for a causal explanation.” (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, Axess • 2008 07 16)
• Food for Thought (2008 07 15)
• Sir John Templeton: iconic innovator in finance and religion (2008 07 12)
• Running on Faith (2008 07 11)
• Survival of the Sudsiest (2008 07 10)
• David Cameron: Fixing our Broken Society (2008 07 08)
Augustine and the Limits of Politics by Jean Bethke Elshtain.
Why Augustine? Why now? Elshtain brings Augustine's thought into the contemporary political arena and presents a man who created a complex moral map that offers space for loyalty, love, and care, as well as a chastened form of civic virtue.
