Paul Elie:

Wherever you go in Rome, countless others have gone before you. Everything has been seen, done, or sought by somebody else. The streets are made of stones that are broken before they are put in place. There’s not a church, palazzo, piazza, or staircase in the centro storico that hasn’t been rendered by a succession of ace photographers working with state-of-the-art gear—and by centuries of open-air painters before them. The only way to make things new with a camera in Rome, then, is to be fully present in the given moment, which is ipso facto unprecedented. You’re in a piazza with an old-school camera around your neck. A horse trots up right in front of you, so that its head—nose and neck, harness and reins—frames a young man and woman nuzzling on the steps of a fountain. The man has his legs around her, as if he’s pinning her in a romantic pose. There before your eyes is a moment in Rome: edgy, hard to read, unrepeatable. You focus and shoot, and then it’s gone. The city’s heavy history can be a source of freedom—the freedom to see the place in the here and now, since there’s no other way.

Quinn Slobodian:

The solace is that although Gates spends a great deal of money, there is growing scepticism about the intervention of billionaires as a panacea for humanity’s problems. One can see the often comical conspiracies around Gates (and the World Economic Forum with which he is often paired) as an exaggerated symptom of an actual overreach by private actors, who have over the past two decades sought to make policy from business class 40,000ft above democratic governments. That Gates effectively bought the silence of the journalists who could have been his most incisive critics only drives people understandably further towards marginal outlets that have the virtue, at least, of not being supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as they report on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is precisely what separated the work of a man like Paul Farmer from this sort of helicopter philanthropy.

Ivan Šarčević:

Indeed, there are different ways we can relate to tradition and inherited identity. Each generation or its members can identify with that heritage to the point of vanishing as a group or individual, immersed in tradition, in inherited identity (fundamentalists in particular are prone to it). On the other hand, an individual can – though never completely, it seems – reject his collective identity, deny his belonging, always pointing out only his personal choice of identity. It seems that it’s never completely feasible because we human beings are not only our own products but social beings whom other people “classify” and identify even when we don’t want to be classified or identified as such.

Though coherent, identity is a variegated reality, a sum of belongings, or in terms of memory, a collection of remembrances that we keep dearly, but also those we are ashamed of or want to suppress and forget. Some of those recollections we happily evoke while some of that heritage we dismiss. Due to the dark side of memory and negative parts of tradition (especially crimes), some people renounce their heritage, deny or change not so much their identity as some belonging or some elements of their identity. However, there are also those who change their heritage and identities through life.

If we would qualify it in terms of values, then perhaps the healthiest path to developing identity (continued identification) would be to keep regaining the inherited identity, to keep re-engaging in a critical dialogue with it while creatively reprocessing it in freedom. Like the parable of the talents, in gratitude for the inheritance, with things he received an individual regains not only the equal worth of the inheritance but the chance to engage in creative work with the gifts and have them “double” in value.

Jadranka Brnčić:

As long as the memory of the “heroes” (and by rule those are “our heroes”) overshadows the memory of the victims regardless of their national or religious identity, memory will not reach history, and forgiveness will not reach reconciliation. On the contrary, history will move backwards from its full realization. As [Johann Baptist] Metz wrote: “Resurrection mediated by way of the memory of suffering means: The dead, those already vanquished and forgotten, have a meaning which is yet unrealised. The potential meaning of our history does not depend only on the survivors, the successful and those who make it.” A consideration of Metz’s mysticism of suffering unto God suggests that it is possible to face suffering without minimizing its negativity: “For an anamnestic reason, being attentive to God means hearing the silence of those who have disappeared.” […]

If there is no work to integrate the mourners into the political and religious body of society, mourners are recorded as collateral victims and missing persons as a number within statistics. But history’s remains are memory and mourning. There is no historical event as such, but only national and religious narrative identities in conflict and coming out of the conflict, both of which sometimes carry catastrophic consequences for the identity of a human being as imago Dei.

Roger Scruton:

We should not think that these changes in the world of art – which have been paralleled, too, in the worlds of music and literature – are without significance. What we look at, listen to and read affects us in the deepest part of our being. Once we start to celebrate ugliness, then we become ugly too. Just as art and architecture have uglified themselves, so have our manners, our relationships and our language become crude.

Without the guidance offered by beauty and good taste we find it difficult to relate to each other in a natural or graceful way. Society itself becomes fractured and atomized.

This official uglification of our world is the work of the ivory-towered elites of the liberal classes – people who have little sympathy for how the rest of us live and who, with their mania for modernizing, are happy to rip up beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.

What they forget is that ordinary people hunger for beauty as they have always hungered, for beauty is the voice of comfort, the voice of home.

When a lovely melody, a sublime landscape or a passage of exquisite poetry comes before your senses and your mind, you know that you are at home in the world. Beauty is the voice that settles us, the assurance that we belong among others, in a place of sharing and consolation. By contrast, the ugly art and architecture of today divides society rather than bringing it together.

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote,

You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? … If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.

Well, Rikki Schlott has written an excellent and haunting updated version:

Parents ask me: Why are my kids so anxious and depressed? Where do they go all day on their devices? How can I get them back?

If you’re a parent wondering the same, I hope I can be an intermediary for you. I understand the desperation that leads parents to ask me — an older Zoomer whose iPhone has been an appendage since age 10 — to help them understand. I am on the leading edge of a tidal wave of digital natives entering adulthood with harrowing stories to share. So I’ll take my best shot at explaining the malaise of my generation.

Gen Z has inherited a post-hope world, stripped of what matters. Instead, we have been offered a smorgasbord of easy and unsatisfying substitutes.

All the things that have traditionally made life worth living — love, community, country, faith, work, and family — have been “debunked.” 

Sentiments I hear often from peers:

Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.”

Community — “I have enough friends online.”

Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”

Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.”

Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.”

Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”

Everything that matters has been devalued for Zoomers, leaving behind a generation with gaping holes where the foundations of a meaningful life should be. They’re desperately grasping for alternative purpose-making systems, all of which fall short.

I’m not saying all Zoomers should become church-going office drones who churn out babies and never question their country. But our dismal mental health records and the scars on our wrists seem to indicate that becoming faithless digital vagabonds is just not working out for us. […]

I saw a recent quote from Kevin Williamson that gets straight to the heart of a lot of contagious thinking in the last month:

If Hamas wants to put Palestinian children between Israeli soldiers and Hamas terrorists, then the deaths of those children will rightly be understood as an atrocity—but it is Hamas’ atrocity, not the Israeli Defense Forces’ atrocity.

First response: If only it were that simple.

The person who shared that quote listed it under the heading “Clear thinking.” Many, many people, it seems, share this sentiment. But I really am failing to grasp how this is clear at all.

First of all, it is not in any way clear — especially not from this side of the world — that all civilian deaths in Gaza are in fact a result of Hamas’s use of civilian shields. As we have seen and should know full well by now, the best military technology in the world still kills plenty of civilians just by being wrong about the “targets.”

As bad as the civilian deaths we “accidentally” cause are, the point being made is much more sinister. Namely, that, because this is war (which it is), and because Hamas is so evil (which it absolutely is), and because the enemy is embedded among civilians — therefore, the Israeli Defense Force bears no responsibility for who gets killed by their own warheads while they seek justice. Williamson et al. act as if this point is self-evident. It is not. There isn’t even the slightest hint of self-evidence in it.

There is no case where this sort of thinking applies at all, let alone to any extent that warrants the assumptions propping any of this argument up. If a murderer takes hostages, law enforcement doesn’t drop a bomb on the building and call it a day. “Sad for those hostages and bystanders. An atrocity, yes, but at least we know it’s not our atrocity.” Williamson may think that, since it’s war and not “police action,” the rules have changed. But he’s effectively done nothing but roll his eyes to explain why.

Granted that, as with any comparison, there are differences. While no person or group is free of all responsibility for who dies in the process of carrying out even the most righteous act, I’m not saying that there are never individual situations in war where a decision would have to be made that does lead to civilian deaths — as tragedy. But this “it’s their fault not ours” kind of thinking that Williamson exemplifies leads to civilian deaths as sloth, as the result of nothing more than the ancient sin of acedia! It’s shameful, moral laziness and it excuses so much horrifying death with a wave of the hand and a cursory shrug at responsibility.

You can say, as Williamson so stunningly and dismissively puts it, “This is not a time or an occasion for moral muddiness or intellectual flabbiness.” And, in his defense, at least in Williamson’s case, I wouldn’t for a second accuse him of intellectual laziness. He’s thought a lot about this and I have no doubt that he is much smarter than I am. That’s why I’m accusing him of sloth. It is moral laziness that he and half the western world are unwittingly preaching, while at the same time they claim to be rooting out all “intellectual flabbiness.”

(I know that sloth is a funny word, and that it gets used as virtually synonymous with laziness of any and all kinds. But it’s something much more specific, and it really does help to think of it as a moral laziness. And as such, it’s something that the hardest worker and deepest thinker can be perfectly guilty of. “Something in our soul,” Simone Weil wrote, “has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.”)

The Williamsons of the world, and their much less thoughtful echoers, may not think (or want) this to be an occasion for moral muddiness, but moral muddiness is our lot, whether they like it or not. And it is the current lot of Israel and Gaza. Calls to forcefully simplify the matter by declaring muddy water clear are about as meaningful as the manager of a mid-level paper company in eastern Pennsylvania stepping out of the break room and declaring bankruptcy.

But while these declarations of moral simplicity may not hold a drop of water, they are anything but benign.

My sense is that, as with all culture war issues, no one involved is capable of speaking to (or, rather, against) anyone other than the worst representations of the other side. Williamson writes as though anyone who disagrees with him simply must be waving a “stop the genocide” sign. (He has, in essence, chosen to counter much of the Left’s moral laziness with his own brand of the same. Fight fire with fire, as they say.) But you can shudder with horror at everything that happened on October 7th; and you can despise the history of Judenhaas with every fiber of your being; and you support Israel’s war against Hamas as a proper seeking of justice and peace — you can do all these things without stooping to the level of moral obscenity.

Makoto Fujimura:

Hope, first of all, must be realistic. That is, hope can be hope only if it admits that which is darkest while urging toward the light.

Nothing glib, or blind, or deflective toward the depth of despair could be a contender for hope. If hope has not first been silenced before the profundity of evil and loss, then such a two-dimensional offering is more scandalous than fruitful. Realistic is not so much concerned with practicality as it is about truthfulness.

Volodymyr Zelensky:

“We are not ready to give our freedom to this f—ing terrorist Putin.”