The UCP will keep ignoring the elephants in the room. The smoke is out of sight because it rained, but we better understand that it is going to come back worse.
The Move Forward’s political agenda of demilitarization, de-monopolization, and decentralization (3D) is thus key to an understanding of what is different in Thai politics.
I am a political pragmatist and for good reason. There is a perfect storm of historical factors that presses a pragmatic political orientation upon us.
It isn’t our sovereignty that AI threatens (since we never have been sovereign); it is our authenticity.
The production of capital is perhaps a necessary condition of work, but a hyper-focus on capital production will miss its sufficient conditions.
The people who have most belonged and identified with Christian institutions have done everything to avoid their guilt.
There is a sudden realization that our narrative understanding of ourselves, perhaps wrongly occupies a central place in our attention.
Respectable Christians is not content with faith in the Risen Christ, not content with the grace and love of Christ: he wants the comfort and justification of being on the side of power and convention.
A.I. is the awakening of the Balrog and our greed for control has put our fate in the balance.
... every “good morning!” needed a response. Every action engendered an obligation...
The irony in my giving this talk in that place, under these circumstances... reaches my heart with a deep and absurd smile. I grieve it, yes. But God's plans are always better than mine.
You’re also not a friend if you refuse to let people come and say, “I just think you’re absolutely wrong.” You have to listen. You have to share decisions.
is transformed into something much more important, something vital to the life of the world, when the people who share the table are engaging in the practices of love and of thinking.
"...while you may isolate at home for a while, Thou belongs to Me, and I to Thou. And this is no longer a trial."
We have learned ourselves out of covenant relationships, and this is the core of learned loneliness. Covenants seem archaic because so many are not willing to say: I will do my part, even if, for a time, you aren't doing your part.
We are now at the beginning of the end of the modern university. The same disease that polarizes us makes the University less and less relevant. This is not an economic argument; it is an existential one. (With updated links)
It does not take courage to be authentically yourself; it takes humility.
A meal is transformed into something much more important, something vital to the life of the world when the people who share the table are engaging in the practices of love and of thinking.
The non-violent, but argumentative, ideal of liberal education is not the suddenly arrived-at point of a nonpolarized liberal society. Instead, the purpose of liberal education is the iterative practice of a non-violent but argumentative society.
Imagine you are waiting at a train station. You are waiting to try to get on the train of thought that leads to the destination of effective freedom and the path of virtuous moral development.
"Instead of being framed by accounting practices, a company's vision has to inform its accounting practices."
"...a job is a way of fulfilling a vocation, and particular jobs - if we are reflectively learning through them, may generate an evolution in our vocation. A key to making this important point real is being aware of God working in you through a particular job."
Whether it is Bible reading or living in a home, we metaphorically translate what is foreign into familiarity and move what is to what ought to be. That is, overcoming otherness is bringing our uniqueness to a situation not originally intended to accept it, and then translating and transforming the situation so the uniqueness can feel at home.
We may need again to become local and to direct our gaze to humans and particular scales and scopes.
The year in climate is thus filled with lots of room for optimism, provided we can take home these three points: 1) that we are stewards of creation and not dominators of it; 2) that we are constituted for thriving by a sacred relationship to an environment that sustains our wellbeing; and 3) that we reduce our desire.
. But one of the most significant areas of rethink was in our newly interwoven understanding of health. We understood that mental and emotional health was inseparable from physical health.
Thirty-six years ago, Robert Bellah and others, in their seminal book “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” identified a problem and prophesied its social consequences - that of political and social polarization. We live in those prophesied consequences today. The problem, as Bellah and his co-authors identified it, was the tendency … Continue reading Inarticulate Authenticity
I will do my share even if, for a time, you aren’t doing your share.
It may have been the first human, the first common thing she heard in a long while.
The substance of the addiction is thus a way to imitate a certain semblance of well-being and thriving. The problem is, of course, that sustainable sources of thriving are absent, and they must therefore be imitated by artificial substitution. Sustainable sources of thriving are still absent.
I am thankful for the presence of Christ, who is all and in all.
What we need to emphasize then is that our universal claims to spiritual reality are better housed within our aspirations and moral ideals than as housed by any so-called objective descriptions which we have come to doubt as neither objective nor descriptive.
If you are going to argue with someone, you have to see them as rational; otherwise, arguing can’t reach them. You have to try to understand them on their own terms if you are going to give reasons that they see as reasons.
Arguments matter because we live an embedded life in which reality determines moral life, and moral life determines reality. In other words, is it not only true but also legitimate?
Let’s say you and a random social media user, disagree over abortion.... The answer to this question matters greatly. It’s not like a dispute over our particular tastes in food which can remain unresolved without jeopardizing our relationship – it must be settled.
If common sense and superstition are two extremes on a knowledge spectrum, then a hard distinction contained in the folkish idea of speakers and doers is cozying up to superstition.
For Arendt, politics was the back-and-forth interplay between regular people in a democracy. Politics is the realm of freedom (The Human Condition) and will not only combat hyper-partisanship and raw power plays, but may even help us thrive even in the face of great collective challenges.
"It turns out that the concept of common goods is constitutive of pursuing one’s interests."
Now I sometimes say that I’m religiously bisexual because when I found Buddhist meditation, I felt more Christian than ever.
Little did she know that reading would be her competitor, my new mistress.
"... Development itself constantly changes the self’s possibilities such that what would count as one’s ‘best’ transforms in ways that are at once real and out of view."
In fact, one should understand that Sweden’s guiding ideology is not so much collectivism as it is statist individualism; the goal is to make citizens as independent from each other as much as possible.
Rather than leading us to a deeper, more meaningful life, this so-called happiness may be one more thing we don’t really need.
ESG and EDI initiatives remind me of the various English tests we used as a representation of one's English skills: I could get any student to pass the test, but it was really hard to give them the skills to get out of the airport.
Announcement of changes to idealsandidentities.com
The isolated individual is entirely unsatisfactory. Precisely because of a person’s social character, stable identities can only emerge in relationships with stable social contexts. Therefore, there is deep uncertainty about contemporary identity; it’s an identity crisis if you will.
"...to be educated is not to be in control or to master chance, it is to become more authentically who you are."
A marriage, on the other hand, is made by a daily effort to live out the vows until death. In the words of my father, the vows I make to my spouse are not so much like laws that I keep or break; they are commitments that keep or break me. The vows may be taken seriously or not, broken or not, but there is no way of withholding them from homosexuals. You cannot copyright the vows which a homosexual couple is perfectly free to make. The government cannot forbid them to do so, nor can any church.
That which withers in the age of mass reproduction is the authenticity of the individual.
The most valid intuition of the “religionless religion” is their awareness that the vast majority of people today, i.e., those who “cannot believe”, are encountering Christ, even though they cannot adjust to the idea that life acquires meaning only when one “joins the Church”.
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 