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Mass Society and “Public” Sexuality, Part 2: Abortion
One may suggest that life either begins at birth or at conception, but neither option treats life very seriously. A more accurate yet more mysterious option might be “life continues through conception”. Continue reading
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Mass Society and “Public” Sexuality Part 1: Contested Moral Terrain
In our investment in Mass Society, liberal-democratic societies have skilled us at politicizing the nonpolitical. Continue reading
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Dad, but not yet Father
The father we can believe in is one who stretches his arms out in waiting, but not in force. The father never lets his arms drop down in despair, but awaits his children’s return so that he can speak words of love to them. His desire is only to bless. Continue reading
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From Humility to Meekness: From Submission to Agency
A humble individual may be wrong but he must also feel bad about it. Even if one doesn’t feel bad about being wrong there is often real or imagined pressure to virtue signal; I may not feel bad that I was wrong, but I have to apologize as if I did. Continue reading
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Beyond Humility: Intellectual Meekness is a Way of Being
An individual with IM occupies a reality in which one is comfortable with having more questions than answers – celebrates duly the answers she comes up with – but lives with a kind of confidence and faith that having questions is one essential part of being authentically human. Continue reading
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A Private Life and Her Three Communities
Without that inner circle of significant others, we’re left with shallowness and a void: we’re “known of,” but never truly known, even to ourselves. Continue reading
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Fulfilled Needs and Desires: by Gift or by Effort?
A person who thinks of herself secretly as a completely autonomous self, with unlimited possibilities (for this concept is what society teaches), finds herself in an impossible situation. Continue reading
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Authenticity Under Threat: Existentialism and the Church’s Potential Complacency – Part 4
If … the function of organized religion turns out to be nothing more than to house justification, and canonize, the routines of mass society; if organized religion abdicates its mission to disturb individuals in the depths of their consciences, and seeks instead simply to “make converts” that will smilingly adjust to the status quo, then… Continue reading
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Authenticity Under Threat Part 3: Mysterious Relationship
Instead of obeying the Word and Spirit of God, the body of those who love one another precisely insofar as they have been freed from facticity and routine, the orderliness of objective mass society, one surrenders at the same time one’s human and one’s religious integrity. Continue reading
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Authenticity Under Threat, Part 2: Alienation in Mass Society
As we saw from Part 1 in this series of posts (which I encourage you to read before going on), our current systems of knowledge and power are not so much concerned with the authentic identity of concrete persons (you and I). Those systems are primarily concerned with objects of study including such commonplace perspectives… Continue reading
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 