I’ve not done this for a while, so let’s go – cleaning out the emailbox, etc.
The Worst Election Day of My Life via Dawn Eden who has a wondeful post on a book written and drawn by a young woman with Down Syndrome. (scroll down to 11/3)
Also via Dawn – a post from Fr. Stephen Freeman on “The Death of Religion.”
From a Philadelphia acquaintance, an article about a book she says will be helpful to many – letters written by a mother to her daughter who died, too young, of a brain tumor.
Gearing up for Advent? Well, Aquinas and More is ready – they have everything you need!
Congratulations to Jen Ambrose on the birth of her daughter over there in Hong Kong! (And scroll down a bit for her post with a clip featuring audio from the singing of “Immaculate Mary” at her parish over there. Lovely.)
Patrick Hannigan is always good, but this post is particularly worth a look.
Jennifer at Conversion Diary is a must read here – “How Would You Know?”
Recently I was looking through some genealogy documents and noticed that a distant ancestor of mine owned a slave. My own flesh and blood, people probably not unlike me at all, participated in the horror of slavery. Can I be so sure that I would have seen the truth? Or, if I had lived alongside my ancestor, would I have included a human being on the list of possessions I owned? Even if I didn’t own a slave myself, would I have shooed the distasteful subject from my mind by surrounding myself with the comfort that all my friends seemed to think it was fine and, after all, it was perfectly legal? Evil’s most powerful tool is that it always works through lies; the lure to tell yourself that something bad is not really bad at all is a powerful temptation, and one that I’m not sure I could have resisted.
But the question is: How would you know?
Sometimes I think about this, and wonder what advice I would pass along to my own descendants to make sure this never happens again; to help future generations guard against being blinded should they find themselves in the midst of a culture where something terrible is taking place.
What litmus test could you offer that would apply to all places and all times as a way for a person to look around themselves with completely clear eyes, piercing through even the thickest fog of self-delusion and widespread cultural acceptance, and see that they are surrounded by grave evil? Is there any simple way for a person to immediately undergo an earth-rocking paradigm shift in which they look up and realize that the world around them is not what they thought it was?
One thing that stands out in all these examples is that the victims of the widespread evil were categorized as something less than human. In fact, though the exact level and degree of evil that took place may vary, one thing that unites all of these practices as worthy of a place in the Human Depravity Hall of Fame is not only that innocent people were killed or enslaved, but that their humanity was taken away by the societies around them.
Finally, I’m a bit deliquent on this, but some of you who have been reading religious blogs for a long time might recall one of the earlier blogs – Holy Weblog! The blogger produced an entertaining daily collection of quirky religious links. I always really enjoyed it, and was sorry when the blogger’s family obligations moved her to hang it up..
But Holy Weblog is back! Go check it out and bookmark. It’s a welcome return.
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