The Catholic Book Club discussion

2. Share any passages and quotes that you find especially noteworthy. Feel free to share why they are noteworthy to you

"The deeper problem in America isn't that we believers are 'foreigners.' Its that our children and grandchildren aren't."

"The human condition is the same [as in Augustine's day}. We're born; we grow; we die. We ask what our lives mean. We wonder whether any larger purpose guides the world, and why the people we love age and weaken and then pass on. Beauty still pierces our hearts. Hurting the poor and the weak still shames us."

Jill wrote: ""The deeper problem in America isn't that we believers are 'foreigners.' Its that our children and grandchildren aren't."

"The human condition is the same [as in Augustine's day}. We're born; we g..."

I marked those as well, Jill. In my first read through the book on vacation I highlighted huge portions of the book. I'm rereading and marking a good portion of what I missed the first time through.

From Chapter One:

"Religion is to democracy as a bridle is to a horse. Religion moderates democracy because it appeals to an authority higher than democracy itself."

So in a society that seems to be ever more secular, how do we reverse the tide? Cardinal George suggested that things would get much worse before they get better, suggesting that his successor would die in prison and his successor would die in the public square. In short, or horse has lost its bridle and is threatening to throw and trample its rider.

from ch. 4, "There's nothing flat or dull about the created world for a heart fully awake."

In ch. 5 he calls TV a "legal narcotic".

ch. 9 "Mercy is the musical key in which God's justice is played."

ch. 10 "Christianity is not simply a religion for individuals. Jesus didn't come to be our private life coach or to have us follow him on our own. He came to build a family that would set the world on fire with God's love."
trickier doing this given the coronavirus!!

"We take it [baptism] more as a given than as a gift."

I like the Dostoyevsky quote, "Beauty is the battlefield where God and Satan contend for the heats of men." And Chaput, also in ch. 12, "Creation is more than an accident of dead matter. It's a romance. It has purpose. It sings of the Living God. It bears his signature. And it's our home."

Chapter 2:

Even Thomas Jefferson, stopped by a skeptical friend on his way to church one Sunday morning, would say that “no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can [it] be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man and I, as chief magistrate of this nation, am bound to give it the sanction of my example.”

But America’s success stems from more than the procedures the Founders put in place. Even the best process depends on the character of the people who live it. The American project needs a virtuous people. A free market economy requires trust. The people who buy and sell must be trustworthy in order for the system to work. No organizational structure can make up for dishonest people. Regulatory agencies and courts mean very little in a morally crippled culture.

Sound marriages and flourishing families strengthen society. This is why the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision was so poisonous—but also, in a sense, so faithfully democratic. Without the restraints of some higher moral law, democracy instinctively works against natural marriage, traditional families, and any other institution that creates bonds and duties among citizens. It insists on the autonomous individual as its ideal.

In many ways, I think these three quotes from Chapter 2 capture the problem with our society today. By "our" I mean the US in particular, but the West in general. The left seems intent on constructing a distopian society of autonomous individuals in which individual feeling trumps all. Their project requires the destruction of the family and religion, steps that destroy the very foundations of the civilization that they would build upon and necessarily erode the trust required for a modern free prosperous society. And to oppose them in anything, even the insanity of today's 57 favors gender lunacy, brings forth fury and spite of a demonic level, which is also destructive of societal trust.

I don't know what the answer is, but fortunately that's not my job. I'm supposed to live my Christianity faithfully and fearlessly and leave the rest up to God. It's his plan, after all.

This is less a quote than a nod to his description of Flatland. In the very early seventies one of my junior high school math teachers showed us an animated film version of the story. I didn't remember the story details, but took away the idea that any representation of extra dimensions in a world of four dimensions would only be perceived as shifting reflections of those four dimensions, much as a cube passing through a two dimensional world at an angle would be perceived as a variety of two dimensional shapes changing over time.

In my journey back to faith from atheistic agnosticism, after having concluded that creation demanded the existence of a creator, one whose existence transcended the four dimensions we experience, but in many ways outside of our existence and not comprehensible by us, just as a cube is not comprehensible to a square in flatland. I remembered this cartoon and concluded that from my position as a material being in a material world, humanity could not understand God in any way unless He chose to reveal Himself to to us. The next step, of course, is being alert for those potential revelations.

I love the Flatland comment, John, and it moved me to remember the original Superman film with Christopher Reeve. In that film the punishment of evildoers on the dying planet Krypton was to encase them in a two-dimensional sort of Flatland and send them into the void of outer space. Sounds a lot like God’s punishment of them in The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis, where they are consigned to a drab, mean environment in Outer Darkness!