Email news from Ron Dart:
The LIBER AMICORUM tomes on my life and writings now out, 90 contributors, 1100 pages, 2 volumes--so gracious of so many to contribute--welcome any thoughts or insights.
In fall 2018 I began publishing a multivolume series Justice That Transforms, a collection of writings over many years on Restorative Justice. There were three Volumes (so far) in 2018. Wipf and Stock Publishers gratefully re-published (a re-edited version of) Volume One January 9, 2020. The cover is an amazing work of art! I will then hopefully do a series of my general peace and justice writings, entitled Justice the Harvest of Peace. ***NOTE: This spring (2024) I am about to be in full gear again, with two more volumes near publication.***
In many cultures it takes a real man to not act like “a real man” according to those cultures.—WN
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Every saint has a past; every sinner has a future.—Filipino Catholic priest at a RJ Conference, Queen's University, 1999
Christian faith offers the grand privilege of sidestepping one's grasping Ego in favour of a True Self. This alone yields the only ultimate liberty worth embracing.—WN.
‘Hell’ can be described as a perpetual alienation from our true being, our true self, which is in God. (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 7)—Thomas Merton
Why harm people who harm people to teach people that harming people is wrong?—WN (adapted)
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.—John Kenneth Galbraith
Altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some [liberal] ideological shibboleth… is likely to produce far more trouble than good.—Jordan Peterson
In [a true fairy-story] when the sudden 'turn' [J. R. R. Tolkien calls this a 'eucatastrophe'] comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through. . . The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. . . The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.—From Epilogue of Tolkien: On Fairy-Stories.
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.—Leonard Cohen in Anthem
Jesus and his destiny are, symbolically speaking, the lens through which the rays of all history since the creation of the world are focused and projected into the future.—Hans Schwarz
Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organised, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.—Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, pp.16 & 17.
The relationship of Christianity to the world that gave birth to it is, then, paradoxical. The faith is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity, and the index of its utter transformation. . . It has long survived the collapse of the empire from which it first emerged, to become, in the words of one Jewish scholar, ‘the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world’ (A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Daniel Boyarin, p. 9.)—Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, pp. 10 & 11.
The success, then, of the most influential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed always depended on people like my godmother: people who saw in the succession of one generation by another something more than merely the way of all the earth.—Tom Holland in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, p. 535
Christianity's principles . . . continue to dominate much of the world; Tom Holland's thoughtful, astute account describes how and why . . . An insightful argument that Christian ethics, even when ignored, are the norm worldwide.—Kirkus (starred review)
The roots of liberalism—belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people—all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West.–from description of Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism; emphasis added).—Sir Larry Siedentop
In this fascinating book, Glen Scrivener takes readers on a journey to discover how the teachings of Jesus not only turned the ancient world upside down, but continue to underpin the way we think of life, worth, and meaning. Far from being a relic from the past, the distinctive ideas of Christianity, such as freedom, kindness, progress and equality, are a crucial part of the air that we breathe. As author Glen Scrivener says in his introduction: “The extraordinary impact of Christianity is seen in the fact that we don’t notice it”.—The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality, by Glen Scrivener
When we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching.—Irish literary critic Terry Eagleton in: Dominion by Tom Holland, review – the legacy of Christianity
Modern reformers complain, quite justly, about the violence of Christianity, René Girard says, but they fail to notice that “they can complain [only] because they have Christianity to complain with.”—David Cayley in Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, p. 404.
How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone, and yet I owe more to you than to anyone.I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal, and yet you alone have made me understand your holiness. . . Countless times, I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face–and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too--where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects.—Carlo Carretto
Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.—St. Teresa of Avila See too: the lovely song, based on Philippians 4:8, in turn on Nada te turbe (Let nothing disturb you)—St. Teresa's greatest prayer. Then listen to: a virtual choir of Carmelites sing it; and a recent composition referencing it: Don't Be Sad and Lonely.
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