This club and its members support the reading of old books...
I’ve been recommending this clip from the Conan O’Brien show to anyone willing to listen (many simply back away, slowly…). It’s side-splittingly funny, and about as true as anything I’ve ever heard. Unbeknownst to Louis CK, he speaks to the existential condition of “restlessness” that Tocqueville believed would particularly infect a democratic people, rendering them incapable of satisfaction and inciting them to frenetic and unfulfillable activity. Enjoy - and weep.
The first and greatest priority is God himself, that God who is too easily pushed to the edges of our lives, focused on "doing," especially through "techno-science," and on "enjoyment-consumption." That God is even expressly negated by an evolutionist "metaphysics" that reduces everything to nature, to matter-energy, to chance (random mutations) and to necessity (natural selection), or more often is said to be unknowable according to the principle that "latet omne verum," all truth is hidden, as a result of the restriction of the horizons of our reason to that which can be experienced and measured, according to the view now prevalent. That God, finally, who has been proclaimed "dead," with the assertion of nihilism and the resulting collapse of all certainty.
The most terrible malady in the West today is not tubercolosis or leprosy but feeling unwanted, unloved and abandoned. We know how to cure bodily sickness with medicine, but the only remedy for loneliness, helplessness and despair is love. Many die in our world for lack of a piece of bread but even more die for lack of a little love. Poverty in the West is a different sort of poverty: not just the poverty of being alone but also of spirituality. There is such a thing as a hunger for love just as there is a hunger for God.
It is one of the great paradoxes of our time that man, who began the period we call "modernity" with a self-confident assertion of his "coming of age" and "autonomy", approaches the end of the twentieth century fearful of himself, fearful of what he might be capable of, fearful for the future.Over the last four decades, Christianity has even questioned the importance of its doctrines, tradition, identity, and even itself. I am convinced that orthodox Christian faith, especially Catholicism, bears the fullness of Truth to shed light on the darkness of this world, leading mankind to his ultimate destiny with God. The Church has the ability to answer the deepest longings of the human heart: love, Truth, justice, hope, faith, charity, communion, unity, and above all a relationship with the Creator. The Church, divinely instituted, is the only power on earth that has the tools to build a culture around those aforementioned longings. She must permeate every aspect of modern life with a powerful witness to the Truth; as Pope Benedict has said,
Christianity, Catholicism, isn't a collection of prohibitions; it's a positive option.
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