Nathaniel Kidd

“the Liturgy is accomplished faith, lived faith. It plunges us into the full reality of the truth of faith; it creates the spiritual space in which the world of faith or, more correctly, the world disclosed by faith penetrates every pore of our being, in which we breathe the supernatural air; it brings us to the ultimate reality which, in the holy Sacrifice of the Mass and in the sacraments, we even touch ontologically.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Liturgy and Personality

“The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality through experiences of closeness and warmth with others. The reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood as the evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology of intimacy: social relationships of all kinds are real, believable, and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person. This ideology transmutes political categories into psychological categories. This ideology of intimacy defines the humanitarian spirit of a society without gods; warmth is our god.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“There are Christians whose three cardinal doctrines are (1) once saved always saved; (2) perfection on earth is impossible; (3) my future sins are already forgiven. These are less of a doctrinal system and more of a plan for excusing carnality. This kind of Christianity is matched by its evil opposite, which holds three truths to be scripturally evident above all else: (1) faith without works is dead; (2) nobody goes to heaven without true holiness; (3) we have free will. These are less of a doctrinal system and more of a declaration of intent to pursue righteousness by works. Any of these propositions might underwrite a healthy life of faith if placed in their proper contexts. But taken by themselves, or combined with other emphases that reinforce their dangers without balancing them out, they are disastrous.”
― Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

“Even when they speak of the need for "meaning" and "love," therapists define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient's emotional requirements. It hardly occurs to them -- nor is there any reason why it should, given the nature of the therapeutic enterprise -- to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause or tradition outside him self-love as self-sacrifice or self-abasement, "meaning" as submission to a higher loyalty -- these sublimations strike the therapeutic sensibility as intolerably oppressive, offensive to common sense and injurious to personal health and well-being. To "liberate" humanity from such outmoded ideas of love and duty has become the mission of the post-Freudian therapies and particularly of their converts and popularizers, for whom mental health means the overthrow of "inhibitions" and the nonstop celebration of the self.”
― Phillip Rieff