A Sensible Life

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  • Pass the Restorative

    Pass the Restorative

    I have concluded that I am not a “conserve”ative. I am a “restore”ative. I do not desire to conserve the new healthcare plan, the degradation to our Constitution that has occurred over the last 150 years, the culture of licentiousness and abortion that characterizes our country… I wish to restore our Constitution to its original clarity. I wish to restore the culture of life that led our founders to write the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I wish to restore a citizenry that values freedom and responsibility…

    The problem with the moniker “conservative” is the very root of the word. How can the act of conserving define my belief? It cannot! What defines my belief is that which I desire to conserve and that which I desire to cast onto the dung heap… If it is the business of “conservatism” to maintain the status quo, then, as G.K. Chesterton said, “The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”

    In a nutshell, I am fed up with the labels “conservative” and “liberal”. The labels are practically meaningless. The fact is that as a rule “conservatives” are more liberal than “liberals”. That is, “conservatives” are more likely to live liberality, to practice gratuitous giving and humbly embrace gratuitous receiving. “Conservatives” are more likely, as a group, to value liberty while their counterparts seek to create government bureaucracies and regulations designed to restrict liberty. “Conservatives” are more likely to trust their fellow citizens and to allow them the freedom to choose Good while their counterparts seek to coerce the populace into living according to the restrictive standards set by a plutocracy of social engineers.

    So I’m more inclined to favor those who call themselves “conservatives” than those identified as “liberals” but if you want to call me something, call me a restorative – and on that note, I think I’ll go have one…

  • “Social Justice” Ideology Opposed to Moral Living

    “Social Justice” Ideology Opposed to Moral Living

    Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, “What our Lord says to Judas, he says to the world today: You seemingly are very interested in social justice. Why are you not concerned about individual justice? You love your neighbor, why do you not love God? This is the attitude of the world today. We have swung away from a period in which we were concerned with individual sanctification to the neglect of the social order. Now we have gone to the extreme of being immersed with social justice, civil rights, and so forth, and we are not the least bit concerned about individual justice and the duty of paying honor and glory to God. If you march with a banner, if you protest, then your individual life may be impure, alcoholic, anything you please. That does not matter. Judas is the patron saint of those who divide that universal law of God: Love God and love neighbor.”

    “Social justice” has taken on the status of an ideology in our culture. Adherence to this ideology allows us to commit (or participate in) any number of attrocities while remaining untroubled by our consciences. We participate in sin through: counsel, consent, provocation, praise or flattery, concealment, partaking, silence and the defense of the ill done. We can stand by and witness the taking of innocent life on a massive scale, turn a blind eye to the degredation of morality in our culture, watch the destruction of marriage, see our religious (and many other) freedoms restricted day by day but these things do not trouble some of us so long as we continue to support the ideology of social justice.

    Of course, the greatest manifestation of this phenomenon can be seen in the participation of many in the public square. These well-meaning but ill-formed voters think they are doing good by supporting political candidates who conform to the social justice ideology while actively seeking the destruction of marriage, the destruction of innocent human life and the limitation of human freedom (including religious freedom).

    Here at A Sensible Life, we work to explore authentic justice. Authentic justice, the distributive justice contained within the Catholic Church’s social teaching, grows from a root of gratuitousness, that is a free giving. This justice then is characterized by freedom and is opposed to the idea of imposing “social justice” by taxing some in order to aid others.

    We must seek truth in all our public and private activities. And, of course, in order to seek truth in sincerity we must be prepared to love and live the fruits of our seeking. This preparedness we call FREEDOM. The pursuit of freedom itself entails some effort on our part. We must actively seek to free ourselves from attachments that restrict our ability to embrace truth – attachments to sin, to certain ways of life, to certain ways of thinking, to ourselves and our own thoughts and, particularly in this current culture, to ideologies. On December 19, Pope Benedict XVI wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times entitled “A time for Christians to engage with the world.” In it, he spoke of this importance of remaining authentically free: “Let Christians render to Caesar only what belongs to Caesar, not what belongs to God. Christians have at times throughout history been unable to comply with demands made by Caesar. From the emperor cult of ancient Rome to the totalitarian regimes of the past century, Caesar has tried to take the place of God. When Christians refuse to bow down before the false gods proposed today, it is not because of an antiquated worldview. Rather, it is because they are free from the constraints of ideology and inspired by such a noble vision of human destiny that they cannot collude with anything that undermines it.”

  • Hope

    Hope

    I have been reflecting upon the Christian theological virtue of Hope in the last couple of weeks. This reflection has led me to a greater level of peace than I have been experiencing for the last months – perhaps the last few years…

    Christmas time is a great time to focus on the virtue of hope but the fact that I began reflecting on this virtue came more by chance than from a deliberate or thoughtful act of my will during this time (though it is likely, however, that God’s will had something to do with it). Flying back from a business trip in New York, I decided to pick up where I had left off several months ago in a little book by Father Jacques Philippe entitled Interior Freedom. By way of a side note, I highly recommend this and several other short treatises by the good Father Philippe, readily available at “fine booksellers everywhere” (not necessarily the mass retailers…). I picked up where I had left off the last time I read the book – in the middle of a chapter on the interplay between the theological virtues. Upon reading and reflection, I found I had been neglecting the virtue of hope!

    After quoting St. John (1 John 3: 1-3), Father Philippe writes, “This astonishing statement is perfectly in line with the great prophetic vision of the Old Testament, where pure-hearted people are not so much those free of all faults and all wounds, as those who put all their hope in God and are certain his promises will be fulfilled.” So we can live an intense purity, a joyful lightness; even when we may feel burdened by our own shortcomings and, quite frankly, by some of the ugliness and sorrow we see in the world around us. We can still be light, you see, because God’s promise transcends this world. In fact, hope provides our sole means of maintaining joy (and we are called always to maintain our joy) in the face of the tragic acts of violence that result in the suffering most recently experienced in Newtown Connecticut but also on September 11, 2001, in the Oklahoma City bombing, in Columbine, in the too frequent acts of mass violence we have experienced in this country and around the world but also in those individual violences executed against the most innocent among us, the unborn.

    As I said earlier, Christmas time is a great time to focus on Hope but in reality every feast of the Church, every celebration of the birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection of Our Lord has at its core a message of hope. Every Christian celebration (of Our Lord or of his mother or of the saints whose lives reflected his goodness) serves to increase in us this divine hope, this unwavering trust in the goodness of God and in the goodness of his will, the goodness of what he wishes for each one of us, the goodness of what he desires for those who have died in the violence of human anger or in the violence of natural disaster, the goodness he can and does bring even out of evil (whether or not we can see or comprehend it), the goodness of our ultimate end with Him…

    Hope brings divine perspective to every event, act, word, thought of our lives. Hope purifies our every act, word, thought. Hope turns our focus from a preoccupation with self to a preoccupation with all that which is other than self, principally to the good envisioned by God for all souls (including our own).

    As with any virtue an excellent way to increase hope, to strengthen it, is to practice it. However, hope being a theological virtue, we must count on God’s gratuitous goodness to plant this gift in us. Let us pray for this gift for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters and let us practice it without ceasing! May this virtue burn brilliantly in us, may it increase our lightness to the point that we might fly with the angels, for G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

    I will work on taking myself lightly and I will work on taking world affairs lightly. That is not to say I will ignore the affairs of the world or the affairs of the public square. In my reflections on Hope, I found myself faced with the temptation to chuck the public square the direction of whose affairs I had found so disturbing in recent months. If Hope directs us to ultimate ends, I argued, why focus on the bothersome affairs of this world at all? The answer to that question, of course, is charity. Though we trust in the ultimate goodness God, we must not leave the working of good to God alone. Charity calls us to action. Lest hope lead us to rely solely on the efforts of God, charity leads us to active participation in God’s works, both temporal and supernatural. The Second Vatican Council reminds us of our role in participating with God in the perfection of that which he has placed in our care, according to the gifts He has given each of us; the Holy Spirit makes of us “free men , who are ready to put aside love of self and integrate earthly resources into human life, in order to reach out to that future day when mankind itself will become an offering accepted by God” (Gaudium et Spes, Chapter III).

    So, in addition to those efforts directed toward my family, friends and work, I will continue my efforts to bring goodness and truth into the public square and my efforts to live justice and to form others in authentic Catholic social teaching. A Sensible Life will rally on, stronger than before in the sure hope of God’s goodness.

  • The Great Boycott Controversy

    The Great Boycott Controversy

    I recently initiated a boycott of Gilbert Magazine, not because I dislike the magazine but, on the contrary, because I love it (though I recognize its failings) and I love the American Chesterton Society (ACS). I love these institutions in much the same way that I love the United States of America and in much the same way that I love my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. I do not love them because of their perfection but, rather, I love them because of their potential good, their potential beauty and even because of the beauty and goodness that has been, hoping that it may be again. I love them with their failings.  In fact, I love them so much that I am willing to expose their failings to the light of day.  I am eager to love them in a manly way and I fear any failure of love that may manifest itself in the form of indifference.  So, in the case of Gilbert Magazine and the ACS  my love took the form of a boycott.

    The occasion that gave rise to this action of love was the editorial by Dale Ahlquist in an issue of Gilbert Magazine published in the months leading up to the recent presidential election (“Why I Won’t Vote for Mitt Romney”, May/June 2012).  I laid out my objections to Mr. Ahlquist’s editorial in another article here at A Sensible Life so I will not say much more about it in this piece other than to say that I found it impossible to get through to folks at the ACS without resorting to the step that I eventually took, the Boycott.  The good news is that the Boycott had an almost immediate positive effect.  I was able to get the attention of some folks at the ACS.  The Boycott engendered some conversation on Mark Shea’s blog as well as on the ACS blog and the ACS Facebook page.  Unfortunately, the folks with whom I interacted remain entrenched in their support of Mr. Ahlquist’s position.

    Let me just say that though I find Mr. Ahlquist’s position poorly reasoned and indefensible, I would not normally make a public objection to an individual’s privately held belief.  The problem with Mr. Ahlquist’s error is manifestly that it is not a private error but one that he made publicly not only in his own name but also “for the editorial board of Gilbert Magazine“.  In effect, he relied upon his position on the editorial board of the magazine and as president of the ACS to attempt to sway readers away from a sensible approach to our 2012 elections.  Rather than remaining silent or, better yet, encouraging Gilbert readers to actively support the candidate on the correct side (if not absolutely correct, then most certainly correct on a relative basis compared to his opponent) of the great moral absolutes of our day (marriage, life, religious freedom), Mr. Ahlquist led those who would follow him to disregard their civic duty.

    In the somewhat jovial though serious debate that ensued as a result of the Boycott, Mr. Shea and other Ahlquist/ACS supporters objected strenuously to my objection but their objections can broadly be summarized in two points: (a) Gilbert Magazine and Mr. Ahlquist have minimal influence in this country and (b) Mr. Romney was a flawed candidate (a point to which I stipulated over and over again).  I don’t know which of these objections I found more troubling.  The first indicates to me a frivolousness (and by that I do not mean Chestertonian frivolity!) that is unbecoming of an organization founded upon the memory and thought of the great apologist and social/political commentator, G. K. Chesterton.  I cannot imagine Chesterton taking a controversial position and then when that position runs into some public resistance, tucking his tail between his legs and saying, “well it doesn’t really matter what I say because no-one reads what I have to say anyway”.  Further, this frivolous response to my objections seems to me to indicate a failure on the part of  Gilbert Magazine  and the ACS to embrace the significance of the role they could (and frequently do) play in reclaiming our culture and society and the positive impact they could have in the public square.  I am glad they had some fun with the Boycott but I am disappointed that to a certain extent their fun became a cover for their inability to defend an indefensible position.

    With regard to the second point the Ahlquist/ACS defenders raised, the faults of Mr. Romney as a candidate, I can only say that I found it to be a red herring.  Of course, Mr. Romney was a flawed candidate.  However, this objection merely served to attempt to distract the conversation away from the fact that they were unwilling to act positively to remove President Obama from office.  In all the dialogues in which I engaged, none of the Ahlquist/ACS crowd was willing to admit the obvious: no matter how bad a candidate Mr. Romney was, he was substantively better than President Obama on all three of the great moral absolutes facing us this election cycle (defense of real marriage, protection of innocent life and protection of religious liberty).  Why did they refuse to acknowledge this reality?  I fear it is because of an ideological bias against Mr. Romney’s party.  I also fear there is a substantial contingency within the ACS that appears to hate the Republican Party so much that it is unwilling to ally itself with the Republicans in order to save the lives of innocent children, save the institution of marriage in our country and safeguard our religious freedoms.  I realize Mr. Romney would likely not have done all we could hope in any of these areas.  But there is no doubt that as a result of having President Obama in office for another four years we will lose more lives of innocent unborns that we would otherwise have done; our religious liberties will be further eroded; and marriage will suffer greater and more powerful attack.

    Herein lie the reasons behind the Great Boycott. I wanted to awaken Gilbert Magazine, the ACS and Mr. Ahlquist to their responsibilities as the foremost commentators on Chestertonian thought in the United States.  Have fun, by all means but do not be frivolous!  Also, I would like to see the ACS work with others of us out here in the hinterlands to educate the American public in authentic Catholic social teaching.  For too long Catholic social teaching has been misconstrued in such a way that it has led many men and women of good will to believe in progressivism.  Progressivism and big government control of social programs are not authentic manifestations of Catholic social teaching.  A proper understanding of gratuitousness, freedom, responsibility, subsidiarity and solidarity will lead us to a distributed approach to dealing with the needs of our brothers and sisters and with our economic activity.  These concepts will lead us away from a focus on centralized government.

    Let us unite in guiding and informing our society.  Let us have fun doing it but let us be serious about it.  Let us be willing to work for small victories (like defeating President Obama) when no greater victory is within our grasp!

    “Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” (GKC) Hence, the Great Boycott…

  • Charter – Joseph Lane Farm & Academy

    Charter – Joseph Lane Farm & Academy

    Following is the charter for the Joseph Lane Farm and Academy, established July of 2012. Joe Anderson, the editor and primary contributor to this online journal also serves as the headmaster of the JLF&A. The Academy has two students and one faculty member.

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    Established to serve as a path of holiness for her members, Joseph Lane Farm and Academy will provide a daily regimen of prayer, study, work and leisure aimed at the pursuit of our three fundamental values; Truth, Goodness and Beauty. We will embrace these values and seek a profound encounter with their Author, which encounter will lead to a relationship both radical and enduring, in this life and the next.

    To achieve these ends we will strive individually and as a family to:

    • Grow in confident abandon to the Will of the Author.
    • Form our members in freedom according to our discernment of His Will:
      • Spiritual, moral, human and intellectual formation.
    • Cultivate our sense of wonder.
    • Nurture docility in our relationships with God and each other.
    • Explore Creation together.
    • Fully and effectively participate in Creation.
    • Immerse ourselves in the works of those who have best participated in Creation (writers and artists) or studied and described Creation (scientists and mathematicians).
    • Develop our artistic, literary, analytical and rhetorical talents.
    • Study history in order to understand the challenges, successes and failures of those who have preceded us.
    • Prepare all members but particularly the youngest to live in the world well:
      • Grow in virtue (love, humility, honesty, purity, obedience).
      • Express themselves clearly and with gentility.
    • Maximize our freedom to pursue these ends:
      • Reduce time constraints – freedom from imposed schedules.
      • Economic freedom – reduce needs and dependencies.
      • Freedom to engage culture on our own terms.

    Caritas in Veritate