The first and greatest hurdle Christians have to get over is the engrained delusion that marriage is a creature of the state, which has the power to define, redefine, or even regulate this natural and divine institution.
I am going to argue a simple thesis: That the ordinary men and women who work hard, pay their taxes, take care of their children, and are trying to preserve some of what has been handed down to us a a legacy from previous generations, are not only strangers in our own land: We are the conquered subjects of a ruling elite that is made up of moral aliens who despise us and our traditions
This work has taken me by surprise. The Greek is far more primitive than I had anticipated, though some of the stories are told with great vividness. Ioannes appears to be something of a simpleton, but he has an unusually coherent grasp of certain of our own philosophical concepts.
Note: This letter and the commentary that follows were found in the lava-covered ruins of Herculaneum. It is apparently a copy of a letter sent by a learned Greek to a young Roman friend of Greek ancestry, the poet Statius. The commentary is the response of an educated pagan upon first reading a Christian text, The Gospel According to Saint John.
For anyone who has the time to read a good work of English fiction, I have started to reread Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage. I’ll post an occasional comment and perhaps also put up a very old piece of mine on Trollope. After this, we shall certainly do Plutarch’s dialogue on the Delay of Divine Punishment
Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge. Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation. Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will.
In the midst of war and rumors of war, the ongoing soap opera of “The Sussexes” seems hardly worth mentioning, but if–like some future archeologist, holding his news and sifting through the middens of a 21st century….
It is a main thrust of philosophical Liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. Any attempt to justify revenge must therefore represent a step back toward the jungle from which we escaped all too recently.
Happy Thanksgiving to you all. We are having a simple dinner: vegetables a la grecque–leeks, mushrooms, cucumbers; fresh turkey with corn bread , apple, onion, sage, and sausage stuffing; Southern green beans with bacon and onion cooked in broth; rice of course to honor South Carolina; and pecan pie.
