Hannah Sillars

“And we, too, being called by His will to Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
― Clement of Rome, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians

“It does, however, seem to me that fashionable Western self-loathing is fundamentally misplaced. Almost always it is directed at the fact of our wealth and power, relative to the other peoples of the earth, with the constant, quasi-Marxist (and false) assumption that the wealth must somehow inevitably be stolen from the poor, as if the economic pie were of a fixed size and economics a zero-sum game. Really, a decade and a half after the fall of communism, do we still need to go on disproving this? Our vast wealth does, indeed, impose upon us equally vast responsibilities toward those who remain in poverty. It is the real strengths of the West that created that wealth and that, tentatively and in humility, need to be proffered to those who could profit from them. The self-loathing, however, should be redirected from the mere fact of our prosperity to the disconnection, boredom, feeble-mindedness and infantilism that we have allowed our wealth to let us slip into. The unprecedented comfort of our lives allows us, if we are not careful—and we have not been careful—to lose hold of the fundamental realities that underpin all human existence.”
― Meic Pearse, Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage

“No doubt the movement which rightly or wrongly we have learnt to call the emancipation of women is in the first place a result of the transformation of society into a capitalist and industrial community, in which the home has lost its importance as an economic and productive unity. But the bitter tone of the champions of Woman’s Rights in their arraignment of man’s rule, the suspiciousness which refused to believe that anything but oppression and masculine tyranny was at the bottom of a great number of laws and customs, which in reality were designed just as much to safeguard women and provide them with protectors and maintenance—the rabidity of militant feminists, in short—was a direct reaction against a dressing-gown and slippers tyranny which was peculiar to non-Catholic Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century—a revolt against mock heroes who slouched about their homes trying to assert authority over their womenfolk. The other day I came across a book which illustrates in a rather droll way the extent to which Northern European women have taken it for granted that this peculiar North European form of the subjection of women since the Reformation was characteristic of the whole past of Europe. It was a little essay by an English writer, Virginia Woolf—I confess that it is all I have read of hers,1 but she is said to have a great reputation as a novelist.”
― Sigrid Undset, Stages on the Road

“The other day I came across a book which illustrates in a rather droll way the extent to which Northern European women have taken it for granted that this peculiar North European form of the subjection of women since the Reformation was characteristic of the whole past of Europe. It was a little essay by an English writer, Virginia Woolf—I confess that it is all I have read of hers,1 but she is said to have a great reputation as a novelist.”
― Sigrid Undset, Stages on the Road