Status Updates From Acedia and Its Discontents:...

“Sloth’s cure is staying in the cell, remaining yolked to the work God has given, including the universal vocation of the creation mandates, the task of our particular vocations as individuals, and the various disciplines of a well-ordered life. While perhaps unromantic, this settling into our cell allows for virtue, since natural virtue requires habituation.”

“Sloth is not overcome by non-sloth but by the fullness of virtue, by approving or affirming the world, seeing it as God sees it.”

“When such misunderstood autonomy governs our life, it is inevitable that others must be rejected, for everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself, since every other person is a competitor to our own unchecked sovereignty. The common good is not sought, merely the individual good, and when the goods conflict, a breakdown of genuinely human coexistence has already begun.”

“Each and every mortal thing communicates its interiority, flinging out the hidden mystery of its being, at the same time, speaking forth Christ, through whom all things were made, in whom all things are redeemed, and with whom all things utter back their joyous praise to the father who loves them.“

“Moderns struggle to find the world beautiful, or good, or of worth, and once the world and the things of the world are thought worthless in themselves, they bore us…however horrifying, we find this boredom impossible to give up- we like the boredom- because the meaninglessness of the world allows us to treat it and others and ourselves exactly as we wish.”