Jürgen Moltmann:

In the contradiction between the word of promise and the experiential reality of suffering and death, faith takes its stand on hope and “hastens beyond this world,” said Calvin. He did not mean by this that Christian faith flees the world, but he did mean that it strains after the future. To believe does in fact mean to cross and transcend bounds, to be engaged in an exodus. Yet this happens in a way that does not suppress or skip the unpleasant realities. Death is real death, and decay is putrefying decay. Guilt remains guilt and suffering remains, even for the believer, a cry to which there is no ready-made answer. Faith does not overstep these realities into a heavenly utopia, does not dream itself into a reality of a different kind. It can overstep the bounds of life, with their closed wall of suffering, guilt, and death, only at the point where they have in actual fact been broken through. It is only in following the Christ who was raised from suffering, from a godforsaken death and from the grave that it gains an open prospect in which there is nothing more to oppress us, a view of the realm of freedom and of joy. Where the bounds that mark the end of all human hopes are broken through in the raising of the crucified one, there faith can and must expand into hope. There it becomes παρρησία and μακροθυμία. There its hope becomes a “passion for what is possible” (Kierkegaard), because it can be a passion for what has been made possible. There the extensio animi ad magna [the reaching out of the soul toward the great], as it was called in the Middle Ages, takes place in hope. Faith recognizes the dawning of this future of openness and freedom in the Christ event. The hope thereby kindled spans the horizons which then open over a closed existence. Faith binds man to Christ. Hope sets this faith open to the comprehensive future of Christ. Hope is therefore the “inseparable companion of faith. “When this hope is taken away, however eloquently or elegantly we discourse concerning faith, we are convicted of having none.

Those Greek words are parrésia (confident, open, genuine speech) and makrothumia (patience, forbearance, longsuffering).

Ashley C. Barnes:

Who cares, though, if novels have abdicated whatever secular authority they once might have exercised? One reason to worry is that we lose the necessary practices for using language to sharpen our awareness of the world outside ourselves. If love is equivalent to attentiveness, then an age of attention deficit disorder is also an age when love is disordered. L.M. Sacasas, reflecting on Murdoch’s claim that words shape human attention, suggests that greater care for language might redress our collective dimming of sight: “Were we to properly attend to the world, its particularities and distinctions would emerge, and we would be impelled to…learn to speak adequately if not exhaustively about what we have seen (or heard, or felt, or tasted, etc.).”²³ Attentiveness is the capacity most threatened by our screens and tablets. It may be the capacity that we’d most hope to regain in an afterlife blessedly free from Internet access. We need authors to show us, in writing, an appetite for the universe so strong that it might never end.

Would better words make us more loving here on earth? Is language-assisted attention what novels should train us for? Both Murdoch and James understood that fine-tuned awareness was no guarantee of virtue. As much as James has been taken up to frame an ethics of fiction, he never wavered from his early claim that a writer has no obligation to be uplifting, only to be interesting. His advice to aspiring novelists was to “be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Developing creative awareness means, for James, practicing an almost occult “power to guess the unseen from the seen.”²⁴ But this power is produced by the writer’s responsibly choosing the right words. This secular literary power is not a disclosure of what is there, nor a faithful self-portrait, but a generative as-if. It is because authorship is a powerful creative act that it entails responsibility.

If a secular age is one in which, as Charles Taylor has argued, organized religion is one option among many, then a religion of art must remain competitive against versions of Spiritualism.²⁵ That means that literary art must not only reflect or record the world we can know; it must generate worlds we cannot know by using language “whose highest bid is addressed to…the mind led captive by a charm and a spell,” as James said.²⁶ Keeping alive this secular faith in language’s generative power is one way to spur the production of great art. That faith holds fast to the claim that heaven is an object of desire, not a fact to be proved, and that anything like human immortality must be sustained by our own attentive, responsible use of language here on earth.

James Davison Hunter:

I hasten to add that progressives had not lost sight of enduring injustice. It was plain to see in the patterns of policing and criminal justice, housing, banking, and employment. There was still much work to do. But the rhetorical and ideological center of gravity had shifted. The progressive claim to moral legitimacy was less the demand for economic equality or even economic fairness, and more the demand for racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual inclusion and the recognition it implied. Built on the gains generated by three generations of multicultural education, “diversity” defined by the demand for recognition and approval became the byword. The advantage of this ideological shift was that it created the artifice of concern for the marginalized while retaining the newly found economic, educa-tional, and political advantages of elites. By shifting its focus from equality to diversity, progressives could now downplay, ignore, or otherwise dismiss the interests of struggling working-class people and their families—a demographic that would eventually include millions and millions of Trump voters.

The irony runs deeper still. Not only did the new progressives abandon the critique of capitalism and their defense of the interests of the working class and poor, they came to embrace bourgeois economic and cultural values. The injuries that had become more central to identity politics would now be evaluated against upper-middle-class norms of status, material comfort, mental health, and social in-dependence, which meant that the measure of inclusion was now the income, lifestyles, and social respectability of the middle and upper-middle class.”

In these ways, progressives came to redefine America’s meritocracy. Unlike the WASP meritocracy, the new meritocracy would be, in principle, multicultural (though the progressive activist demographic is overwhelmingly white). But like the old meritocracy, wealth and privilege would be concentrated in ways that would be self-protective of its status, political power, and economic interest through such strategies as exclusionary zoning, legacy college admissions, favorable tax law, and barriers to economic and educational opportunities. And very much like the old meritocracy, perhaps even more so, upward mobility into the echelons of the elite would be accompanied by a corresponding elitism, the smug sense of being on the winning side of history.

Nick Catoggio:

Being a cynic, I find myself wondering if Democrats are pestering Biden to talk more about Trump’s conviction not so much because they expect it to work but because they’re preparing to blame him when it doesn’t. […]

I think the debate over how much to talk about the Trump verdict is largely a product of liberals staring into the abyss and worrying that nothing is going to prevent them from losing to the most grossly unfit president in American history. They’re trying to process that reality and asking themselves, “Could it be that Americans still don’t realize who Trump is? Have we not yet effectively made the case against him, maybe?”

It can’t be that the country wants him. There must be a communication gap somewhere which, once bridged, will assure his defeat. We have a messaging problem.

I know that feeling. My own astonishment and horror at Trump’s enduring viability has inspired something like 500 columns and will inspire 100 more before Election Day. “Do readers not see what a catastrophe he’d be in a second term? If I tell them another 500 times, maybe it’ll sink in.”

It’s a form of denial. The same denial is behind Democrats demanding more attacks on Trump from their nominee over the Manhattan verdict and, inevitably, faulting him for having done too little when he comes up short in November. If only Joe Biden had called Trump a “convicted felon” 800 more times, it would have sunk in.

Hardly anyone who votes for Trump this fall will harbor illusions about his sleaziness, and insofar as anyone does, the bunker of denial they’ve built for themselves is so thick that an atomic bomb blast couldn’t penetrate it. Some Americans proudly relish his sleaziness, others relish it quietly as a guilty pleasure, and others are willing to put up with it as a price worth paying in exchange for him somehow bringing grocery prices down. They’ll all know that he’s a convicted felon by November, though, whether or not Biden personally informs them. And for all but a few of them, it won’t matter.

Richard Stith:

A particular instance of a type of being is distinguished not by its unique character—not by what it is at all—but by the fact that it is, its existence. …

Put another way, one might say that existence is part of the very being of an individual. In searching for a way of thinking that can respect the individuality of people, we are thus looking for a mode of thought that can take existence seriously. Love may indeed do this, but only insofar as it cares for the individual because she is Mary, not because of her Mary-like traits and certainly not just because she is human. By contrast, we need an attitude that cares about individual instances of human being or essence, simply because they are such, as we all do when we recognize the dignity of strangers unnamed and unknown to us. We must somehow find a way to respond to the form or type or idea that we call “human being” and yet to care about particular examples of this type.

To accomplish our task requires a degree of metaphysical courage. In particular, it requires that we give up our comfortable categorization of the lived world into the two boxes called “fact” and “value.” Is our reticence about killing due to some empirical fact of life? If not, conventional thought takes it to be founded on a “value judgment” about life. For such a mindset, our proof that new or continued life cannot be valued sufficiently to prevent killing could be evidence only that our reluctance to kill is irrational and arbitrary. Yet we need not think this way. As Karl Mannheim remarked long ago:

[T]he fact that we speak about social and cultural life in terms of values is itself an attitude peculiar to our time. The notion of “value” arose and was diffused from economics. . . . This idea of value was later transferred to the ethical, aesthetic, and religious spheres, which brought about a distortion in the description of the real behavior of the human being in these spheres.

Against such economistic narrowness, this essay affirms that value language may become a trap and prison of the mind and that the moral world has a multitude of curious creatures in it, many of whom are at least as fascinating as those two beasts of burden called “fact” and “value.” Pierre Manent would agree:

It might be argued that this heterogeneity is adequately taken care of through the public acknowledgment of the legitimate plurality of human values. Nothing could be more mistaken. . . . To interpret the world of experience as constituted of admittedly diverse “values” is to reduce it to this common genus and thus to lose sight of that heterogeneity we [wish] to preserve. If God is a value, the public space a value, the moral law within my heart a value, the starry sky above my head a value, . . . what is not? . . . Value language, with the inner dispositions it encourages, makes for dreary uniformity.

Valuing seeks to dominate the material world. The entire stuff of being becomes a mere resource to be manipulated and shaped into what we value. … No wonder, then, that valuing feels bold and arrogant in contrast to the other attitudes we have examined; a world we only value is a world entirely subject to our evaluation and control.

Respect, by contrast, responds. It eschews control. It steps back before the type of thing cared about, and thus necessarily before every individual example of that type. A limit is given to us and to our schemes of domination. We can no longer destroy and rebuild as we wish; we must accept and accommodate being, even the being of individuals. If I respect human life, if I think it inviolable, then rather than making and manipulating it, I acknowledge and defer to it; I let it be. True, I may sometimes (but not necessarily or always) have a kind of attraction to the object of respect, but even here, my feeling goes beyond the achieving and holding stance that accompanies valuing, to include an appreciative awe or delight.

[…]

[P]rimarily because it is a retreat rather than a charge, respect for each human being can be shared without becoming totalizing or collectivizing. We can find solidarity more safely in a common respect than in a common goal.

Fr. Stephen Freeman:

Apologetics has a noble history. It also has a potential darkness hidden within.

The darkness lies in the dangers of critical thought and argumentation.

What part of the heart is engaged by critical thought and argumentation? In most cases, it is quite possible that no part of the heart is engaged – the exercise can consist in nothing more than rational argumentation and limbic impulses (anger, fear, envy, etc.). This is to say that the “accuracy” of an apologetic article or video can be equally deadly (and sinful) in its effect.

Fr. Thomas Hopko famously taught, “Don’t try to convince anyone of anything.” (#43 in his 55 Maxims).

Hopko’s maxim is an extreme statement, one intended as a wake-up call (I suspect). As someone who has been accused of quietism, I take comfort in such extreme company. I also know that my heart struggles: many days my inner voices do nothing but argue and complain. They leave a trail of alienation and make prayer ever more difficult.

As years have gone by, the phrase, “Guard your heart,” has come to have increasing importance for me. In the course of any given day, I do not find myself struggling to believe “right things.” I am not tempted by heresies. The great struggle is to maintain the most fundamental meaning of the word, “Orthodoxia,” which is “right worship.” Right worship describes the fullness of the heart’s right disposition towards God. The heart is the true battleground of the spiritual life – it is there that I am tempted to put myself in the place of God and others in the place of objects. Such an image of hell! The self as god ruling over a universe of objects!

The reduction of human beings to mere rationality – as if thinking of things were the sum of a human being – is a terrible error. The Liturgy suggests a much greater vision. Just prior to the great prayer of thanksgiving (the Anaphora), the congregation joins in the recitation or singing of the Nicene Creed. The Deacon calls forth this common action with significant words:

” Let us love one another! That with one mind [ὁμονοίᾳ] we may confess, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence, and undivided.”

The “one mind” is not a reference to mere intellectual agreement, but to a true communionof love in which we speak as one. It is an agreement that can only be had through love. It cannot be coerced nor settled by argument.

There is a holy and divine “weakness” within the reality of love. Love must be freely given. In the most extreme case, we may say that God Himself must wait for our love.

St. John records the post-resurrection conversation between Jesus and Simon Peter. Christ asks him, “Do you love me more than these (the other disciples)?” He uses the word “agape” – love in its fullest and most complete sense. Peter responds, “Yes, Lord. You know that I love you,” but, in answering, he uses the word “philia,” a lesser word meaning, “friendship.” Christ asks the same question a second time, and gets the same answer. The third time, Christ lessens his question and says, “Simon, do you love (philia) me?” The text says that this troubled Peter, who said, “Lord, you know all things, you know that I love (philia) You.”

It strikes me that, in that conversation, Christ never hears from Peter that his agape is returned. Peter is offering an honest answer. He knows that he has failed the test of agape in his denial of Christ on the night of Christ’s betrayal. All he can say is, “You know I am your friend” (I love you with “friend-love”). …

The patience of God extends for a lifetime (and more). It is noteworthy that Peter himself writes this:

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9 ESV)

Mary Huntington:

Perhaps, then, one central issue that can’t be reached by tax changes or different housing policy that the enabling paradigm of modernity itself – of technology, of “progress” – is radically hostile to the mindset required to welcome children. This possibility then also provides a window into a great deal else, which has been marginalised by the ideology of Progress. For by extension, the technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship – because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources.…

That might mean, for example, raising meat animals in accordance with their nature rather than in accordance with the industrial search for maximum yield. And meeting someone or something where it is means accepting limits on what we can demand. In the context of human connections, as for example a baby’s needs, we don’t call this “limits” but simply “relationship”. To accept relationships that fall outside transactional logic is to accept being bound by and to something we can’t always control, and can’t always opt out of. Belonging to others means accepting that those relationships place constraints on us. As a wife and mother, for example, I couldn’t just move overseas for three months at no notice. This is not oppression; it’s an enabling condition for the freedom I have to live the life I have well.

David Walker, a free black man born in 1796, in what James Davison Hunter calls “one of the most important polemics of the early nineteenth century… a statement as radical as any of the Revolutionary period”:

Are we MEN!!—I ask you, O my brethren! are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we? Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we? Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone? Is he not their Master as well as ours?—What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself? How we could be so submissive to a gang of men, whom we cannot tell whether they are as good as ourselves or not, I never could conceive. However, this is shut up with the Lord, and we cannot precisely tell—but I declare, we judge men by their works.

The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority. …

… In fact, take them as a body, they are ten times more cruel, avaricious and unmerciful than ever [pre-Christian Europeans] were; for while they were heathens, they were bad enough it is true, but it is positively a fact that they were not quite so audacious as to go and take vessel loads of men, women and children, and in cold blood, and through devilishness, throw them into the sea, and murder them in all kind of ways. While they were heathens, they were too ignorant for such barbarity. But being Christians, enlightened and sensible, they are completely prepared for such hellish cruelties. Now suppose God were to give them more sense, what would they do? If it were possible, would they not dethrone Jehovah and seat themselves upon his throne?

“Can anything,” Walker goes on to ask, “be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which it is conducted by the Americans?”

… He…who…has…ears — shutter.

David Frum:

Most of Haley’s supporters voted for her as a way to stop Donald Trump. Haley’s announcement today that she intends to vote for Trump won’t raise their opinion of him; it will only lower their opinion of her. When she says, as she said again today, that she wishes Trump would “reach out” to her voters, she’s speaking words that may sound like English, but make no sense. The only way Trump could reach out to Trump-skeptical Republicans is by pleading guilty to the many criminal charges against him and vowing to devote the rest of his life to restitution for the victims of his many civil frauds.

[…]

From the point of view of Trump-skeptical Republicans, this election is no more about Joe Biden than a fire in a children’s hospital is about the fire extinguisher. They don’t think, Gee, I wish this extinguisher were newer, so I’ll let the children burn to death. They think, I hope there’s still an ounce or two of flame-retardant foam left in this old thing—and if there is, I’ll be damn grateful for it.