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Catholic Voices Comment HT Rod Dreher

• First Things Marriage Pledge
• A Time to Rend
• First Things: Marriage and Temple Desecration
• Youtube Playlist Humanum Series
• Damon Linker: The Religious Right Calls it Quits
• Why you should not sign the pledge
• Mere Orthodoxy on the libertarian solution
• First Things a legal perspective

CT

This is a clear and concise position statement for non-affirming like the CRC. This position, however, is seen as a non-starter by the affirming crowd.

First Saruman was shown that the power of his voice was waning. He cannot be both tyrant and counsellor. When the plot is ripe it remains no longer secret. Yet he fell into the trap, and tried to deal with his victims piece-meal, while others listened. Then I gave him a last choice and a fair one: to renounce both Mordor and his private schemes, and make amends by helping us in our need. He knows our need, none better. Great service he could have rendered. But he has chosen to withhold it, and keep the power of Orthanc. He will not serve, only command. He lives now in terror of the shadow of Mordor, and yet he still dreams of riding the storm. Unhappy fool! He will be devoured, if the power of the East stretches out its arms to Isengard. We cannot destroy Orthanc from without, but Sauron – who knows what he can do?’ ‘And what if Sauron does not conquer? What will you do to him?’ asked Pippin. ‘I? Nothing!’ said Gandalf. ‘I will do nothing to him. I do not wish for mastery. What will become of him? I cannot say.

J.R.R. Tolkien (2009-04-17). The Lord of the Rings (pp. 584-585). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Jesus Creed

here are two pole ends on this one. For some people, the essence of spiritual formation is being made holy and for others it is about being made loving. Those at the end of each pole minimize the opposite end. Many strive for a balance. It is too easy to stereotype into poles on this one because people fit onto the spectrum between the poles.

NYTimes

When it comes to young voters, liberal politicians are victims of their culture-war success. They have pressed a laissez-faire posture in moral and private matters, and have won. But millennials have adopted not the posture of their liberal elders that fostered group identity (be it “union member,” “disenfranchised minority” or “F.D.R. Democrat”), but a soft libertarianism that makes individual preference king.

That pose carries over to politics and blunts lasting commitments to any political organization. Indeed, another finding of youth surveys is mistrust of institutions of any kind, including political parties. Once social conservatism was defeated, the set allegiance to Democratic campaigns was bound to erode.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/november-web-only/we-are-not-enough-in-awe-of-god.html

First Things 2010

I will in this essay follow the fashion of referring to the present historical moment as the advent of a “post modern” world, because, as I am increasingly persuaded, the slogan does point to something real, a world that has no story and so cannot entertain promises.

Analysts from all relevant disciplines converge on one insight: Modernity has lived on a moral and intellectual capital that it has not renewed, and indeed could not have renewed without denying itself. They moreover agree that this intellectual and moral capital was that built up by the Christian church’s long establishment in the West, also if they themselves do not share the church’s faith or even admire it.

Most usually this is done by elevating the formal or expressive aspects of the act or product of art to be themselves the subject-matter of the work. I have long remembered the remark of a notable art critic—though I have forgotten which one—that many modernist paintings could be understood as fragments of classical painting blown up for their own sake, displaying the formal and technical elements by which painting is accomplished but eschewing the narrative depiction within which such patches of paint on canvas would earlier have had their place.

If there is little mystery about where the West got its faith in a narratable world, neither is there much mystery about how the West has lost this faith. The entire project of the Enlightenment was to maintain realist faith while declaring disallegiance from the God who was that faith’s object. The story the Bible tells is asserted to be the story of God with His creatures; that is, it is both assumed and explicitly asserted that there is a true story about the universe because there is a universal novelist/historian. Modernity was defined by the attempt to live in a universal story without a universal storyteller.

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