Weekly Features Post
Introductory Words: We apologize up front for an abbreviated Weekly Features Post. If you've been logging on regularly, you know that we've been vacationing in Alpena, Michigan, at Eric Scheske's family cottage on Lake Huron. Wi-Fi has allowed us to blog a little, but today is a travel day, so posts will be especially scarce. Regular posting will resume tomorrow morning.
We're also detached from Eric's library and cache of writings, so material for the WFP isn't readily available. We'll work with what we have.
Welcome CE Readers: Welcome to those who have linked over from Eric Scheske's weekly column at Catholic Exchange. If this is your first visit, take a look around: check out the TDE Kiosk and the links and endorsements on the right. If you want to send us an e-mail, the link is on the left.
How prescient of the ancients. Sex has become little better than a zoological act in our day: “The curious thing to our ears is how rarely the Latins speak of sexus. Sex, to them, was no issue; it was amor they were concerned about. Similarly, everyone knows the Greek word for eros, but practically no one has ever heard of their term for 'sex.' It is phylon . . . a zoological term.” Rollo May (quoted in Josef Pieper's Love). For Walker Percy's idea of where the free sex culture could lead, we recommend Thanatos Syndrome.
Economic activity unfettered is the most productive, but it'd be that much better for our culture is everyone understood that there's much more to life and society than economics. We suspect many laissez-faire economists would support Illich in the following: “For Illich, it is always a matter of balance, the sufficient, the fitting. Beyond a certain limit, economic production is counterproductive, destroying rather than enhancing cultural life. Modern economy, dominating and displacing autonomous activity, is ersatz culture, replacing use-values with commodities that render us helpless to subsist in any meaningful way.” Robert Kugelmann, writing about Ivan Illich's economic idea in The Challenges of Ivan Illich.
Stoic's Porch: “Reverence of the daimon consists in keeping it pure from passion and thoughtlessness, and dissatisfaction with what comes from gods and men.” Marcus Aurelius
Maybe that's why The Man keeps inner-city public schools in existence: “[T]he South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro.” W.E.B. Du Bois.
That's Why Others Simply Can't Understand It: “The Church is on the march through time as a regiment marches through strange country, cut off from all its ordinary supplies.” Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest.
