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More Thee, less me - Bonus post from Rod Dreher's Diary
A Lenten Series for Supporters
March 04, 2024
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In the Orthodox Church, today is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, the annual pre-Lenten Sunday in which we reflect on the Lord’s parable (Luke 15:11-32) in which He compares the Kingdom of God to a household in which a merciful father welcomed his wastrel son back home, even as a jealous older brother, who had never left home and rejected his father, looks on with resentment. I’ve been pretty sick all week, and was too weak to go to the liturgy this morning. Instead, I prayed the Divine Liturgy at home, and then re-read Henri Nouwen’s marvelous little study The Return Of The Prodigal Son, which I haven’t read in nine years. It is a short book — you can read it in one sitting, which I just did — but one of the most profound in my entire library.

Nouwen, a Catholic priest who died in 1996, writes about becoming fascinated by Rembrandt’s famous painting from 1669, one of the last before the great man died. In 1983, Nouwen traveled to the Soviet Union to see the original in the Hermitage Museum. The painting became an invitation and a motivation to deeper conversion, which Nouwen discusses in his book. In its pages, Nouwen examines his own life in terms of the prodigal son, the resentful brother, and the merciful father.

I last read this book when I was near the end of my own struggle to reconcile myself to my father — which was also, though I only realized it late, a struggle to reconcile myself to God the Father. In my book How Dante Can Save Your Life (which will be re-issued this week in paperback), there is a passage in which I discovered that my own alienation from God the Father had to do with my internal confusion between him and my own earthly father, whom I saw as the distant taskmaster whom I had to propitiate constantly, but whom I never could satisfy.

As you will recall, I had returned to my home in Louisiana after many years away — years of great worldly success, but success that my father saw as worthless, because I had been away from family. My dad, as well as all the others (but especially him, because they all took their cues from him), rejected me and my family as unworthy, because my original sin was to have left in the first place. I had come home expecting my dad to be the merciful father of the parable, but he and all the others were the resentful brother. As my priest at the time told me, the Lord’s parable is about the kingdom of heaven, not about how we in this world live.

You all know what happened next. I did find reconciliation with my father as he lay dying, thanks mostly to the healing graces the Lord gave me through Dante (the story is in my book). But everything went very bad from there. The Louisiana family dissolved after my father’s death (dissolved in the sense that my sister’s girls scattered, and we don’t keep in touch with them anymore). And my own family painfully dissolved from cracks in my marriage that widened after I became chronically ill as a result of my Louisiana family rejecting us. After years of agony between us, my wife filed for divorce two years ago. The result has been very bad. Our older son and I live abroad; the two younger kids live in Louisiana with their mother.

It would not be right to talk in any further detail about the situation, but it is, for me, a desolation — a desolation that I am utterly powerless to end (believe me, I’ve tried). I would just urge you strongly not to assume that you know what’s going on here. One of the most important things I learned through the last decade of my marriage, culminating in the divorce, is that nobody outside a marriage really understands what goes on within that marriage. I bring this up not to invite speculation, but simply to say that I have never been more desolate than I am today — and that’s saying something.

Please don’t think I invite your pity, or that I pity myself! One of the great gifts of grace that God has given me through all this is resilience. The pain from the loss of almost everything I loved is hard to describe, but at the same time, I feel safe, because my deepening faith has given me the sure knowledge that all this has meaning, and will be redeemed in time if I stay faithful. I live with the wisdom I gained from reading Silvester Krcmery’s memoir about his decade as a prisoner of the Communists: that he characterized his sojourn in that desolate place as an opportunity to be “God’s probe” — that is, to learn what he could about himself, his fellow prisoners, and their suffering, so that he could, in whatever ways possible, reconcile all to the Father.

Why not? What else is there? There is nothing else for me. That’s how I feel about it. It’s weird to say that without sounding wounded and self-pitying, but I assure you, that’s not me. I’m trying to be honest, though. Most of the things I used to care about in life I no longer do. Is this depression? Probably, at least to some extent. But I have a deep sense that it is also purification. Re-reading Nouwen’s precious book today has bolstered that confidence.

I too have seen Rembrandt’s original in the Hermitage, and yes, it is overwhelming. One thing Nouwen doesn’t say, perhaps because the painting wasn’t displayed then where it is today, is that across the narrow corridor hangs Rembrandt’s earlier painting of Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac:

  

Rembrandt created that painting, full of energy and pathos, in 1635, when he was twenty-nine years old, in the middle of the passionate and tumultuous journey of his life. He made the Prodigal Son painting when he was 63, at the very end of that journey. Compare the energy and drama of the earlier painting with the stillness of the later one. At the risk of sounding presumptious, in 2012, when I first learned of how my father and my Louisiana family really thought of me, I was full of the earlier Rembrandt’s passion. Then I entered the dark wood spoken of by Dante. Today, in 2024, having gone through a dozen years of suffering, I hugely identify with the stillness of the later canvas. Life will just beat it out of you. This matters, for a reason I learned re-reading Nouwen’s book today.

Nouwen says his reflection on the painting is “a story of homecoming,” and how he came to understand how he himself incarnates the Prodigal Son, the Jealous Older Brother, and indeed the Merciful Father. What prompted him to write the book was a colleague telling the priest, “Whether you are the younger son or the older son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father.”

I had forgotten that! That line pierced my heart, as it did Nouwen’s. I am only six years younger than Rembrandt when he died. It is time to become the father.

The Prodigal Son

But first, Nouwen considers his own prodigal-son status. As I read my battered copy of Nouwen’s book, I saw for the first time in many years the notes I wrote in the margins, as I was receiving its lessons for the first time back in the last decade. There’s a passage in which Nouwen writes about how a family in Jesus’s time would have seen the son demanding his inheritance and setting out into the world. They would have interpreted it as his wishing the father dead. They would have seen it as a betrayal of family and its values. They would have seen it as a rejection of love.

I wrote in the margins: “How they saw it” — meaning, how my Louisiana family saw my leaving. But it was more than that: it’s how they saw my being different from them. Had I never left, I would have lived under the constant disapproval. I bring this up now in the same sense that Harrison Scott Key, in his great memoir of the near-loss of his marriage, puts himself in the mind of his adulterous wife, so that he can better understand how she came to sin against him so greatly. In my case, I believed then and believe now that my family did a terrible thing to me, my wife, and my kids. At the same time, if I am to forgive them — and I must — I need to understand why they thought and acted as they did. The Jealous Older Brother cannot understand his father’s mercy until and unless he enters into the mind of his prodigal sibling, and tries to understand why he left.

Nouwen writes that for so many years, he has fled from God the Father. There are lots of reasons for this. Among them, the fear that he has disappointed God, that he has failed to live up to the Father’s expectations. He confesses that he has gone out into the world and tried to find satisfaction away from his Father’s house, but always fails. Writes Nouwen, “I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”

It was this realization the first time around that helped purge me of the deep but misleading connection I had made of my earthly father to God the Father. One of the most important lessons for me from Dante’s Commedia was coming to accept the truth that changing your mind is one thing, but infusing your heart (by which I mean, your will) with that change is quite another. Inferno is for convincing you to repent, to accept metanoia, the change of mind; learning how to live that repentance is the purpose of Purgatorio. It was good this morning to recognize once again my own need to return to the Father.

“It was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity,” writes Nouwen, of the Prodigal Son. “He hit the bedrock of his sonship. In retrospect, it seems that the prodigal had to lose everything to come into touch with the ground of his being.”

When I first read these words, I thought I had lost everything. I had no idea what was to come. So: what now? Almost two years after she filed for divorce, and Matt and I left for a kind of exile, and I’m still pondering that question. That said, the little boat in which I’m sailing across these rough waters feels more stable this time, because I have more confidence in God’s love for me. That is an extremely precious grace.

And yet, I am still guilty of this (the quote is Nouwen’s): “I still live as though the God to whom I am returning demands an explanation.” And: “Sometimes it even seems as if I want to prove to God that my darkness is too great to overcome.” What is it within us that resists grace? Maybe it’s not in you, but it sure is within me. Less than it used to be, but this temptation to believe the voice of the Accuser is something I’ll be battling for the rest of my life.

Nouwen makes a radical claim, one that we should take seriously: that Jesus himself was the Prodigal Son, in a sense. He too left his father’s house, and sojourned in a strange land. He returned to the father having been stripped of everything: all his worldly possessions, all his dignity, even his life. And yet, this return was for our salvation. He knew, as he sweated blood in Gethsemane, that there was no way back to the Father for any of us except through this fire.

The Elder Brother

The first time I read the Nouwen book, I recognized that my own dad had been not the Merciful Father, but the Father-As-Elder-Brother. That is, he received me, but with a hard heart, because I had strayed. He was determined to make me suffer distance from him because of that. The difficult truth is that my dad did not see it that way. He really did think he was welcoming us as he ought to. He wrote me to say so, even! What he did not understand about himself was that even before I grew older and left home, he had been the Elder Brother. I think that grace finally broke through in the final weeks of his life. In any case, he died with us at peace with each other.

Nouwen is very wise about the figure of the Elder Brother. Nouwen sees the figure of the Elder Brother living within himself, and observes that the hardest conversion to go through is not the humbling that caused the Prodigal to return, but the humbling of the Elder Brother’s righteous but rock-hard heart.

The lostness of the Elder Brother is harder for the Elder Brother to grasp precisely because it is tied to righteousness. He did all the right things, and yet this is his reward? For his father to slay the fatted calf for that wastrel young brother of his? Nouwen says that all of us face temptation to dwell in resentment over the things that we felt were our due, that we did not receive. The Elder Brother cannot go into the feast because his heart cannot receive the joy of his brother’s return.

This was how my dad was with me. He couldn’t allow himself to feel unbounded joy at his son’s return, because even though his son was there in the flesh (with wife and children too!), he wasn’t exactly like he, the father, wanted him to be. His prodigality was not just his moving away at a young man, but also his choosing to value different things in life, and to have different tastes, than the father had chosen for him.

As I’ve written in my earlier books (and my dad read this before I submitted it to the publisher, so he didn’t mind it being made public), Daddy had lived a life of submission to the will of his parents, and felt strongly that he had been shafted by it. He believed himself to have been righteous through and through (he even told me a few months before he died that he had never committed any sins in life — and he believed it — though thanks be to God he repented of that). I was able to observe the destruction to himself and to his family (= me and Ruthie and our kids) from his hard-heartedness, which Ruthie adopted too, and resolved not to be that way to my kids.

This is why I’m in a much better place today, dealing with the desolation, than I was when it all fell apart with my Starhill family. But I’m still in need of grace. I toss and turn and am tormented by nightmares of loss. When Harrison Scott Key writes in his marriage memoir that he has most deeply understood himself as a husband and father, and now all of that was at risk of being washed away by his wife’s adultery, I very nearly wept. Again, infidelity was not part of the breakup of my marriage, but having to unlearn the role of husband, and having my fatherhood questioned has been agonizing. There is a part of me that resents the injustice of it all. And yet, because of what I went through before, and because of what I learned from Nouwen, and of what I learned from Dante (in particular, Piccarda telling him that earthly notions of justice do not matter in the House of the Father; it is enough simply to be Home), this pain doesn’t hurt as bad as it otherwise would have. For that, I am grateful. Yet I must always be on guard against the Elder Brother rising within me, for I do have a self-righteous streak. In that way, I am my father’s son.

The Merciful Father

The most wonderful and life-giving insight I gained from reading Nouwen this morning, on this Sunday of the Prodigal Son, came from the last part of the book: the one in which he recognizes that he has to embrace the Merciful Father within.

The loving father, says Nouwen, has to allow his children to be free to leave him, to sojourn in a far country, even if it is bad for them. This is what love is: not to assert control, or to be angry and resentful when a child refuses your control. Says Nouwen of the father in the parable: “His only desire is to bless.”

Nouwen says that to become like the Merciful Father of the parable is to become the kind of man who experiences pure joy. It is to become the kind of man who rushes towards good news, to “celebrate every little hint that the Kingdom is at hand.

This is a real discipline. It requires choosing for the light even when there is much darkness to frighten me, choosing for life even when the forces of death are so visible, and choosing for the truth even when I am surrounded with lies.

“Joy never denies the sadness,” says Nouwen, “but transforms it to fertile soil for more joy.” More:

From God’s perspective, one hidden act of repentance, one little gesture of selfless love, one moment of true forgiveness is all that is needed to bring God from his throne to run to his returning son and to fill the heavens with sounds of divine joy.

Nouwen concludes:

A child does not remain a child. A child becomes an adult. An adult becomes father and mother. When the prodigal son returns home, he returns not to remain a child, but to claim his sonship and become a father himself. … The return to the Father is ultimately a challenge to become the Father.

In other words, theosis. The love and mercy that the Father has shown to us prodigals must not rest in us, but must flow through us to others.

Jesus told us, says the priest, to “be compassionate as your Father is compassionate.” Rembrandt shows us what that means. It means to offer mercy and welcome to all who repent. It means to lean into joy and light, and away from sorrow and darkness.

Nouwen writes of looking in the mirror and seeing the image of his late father in his own visage:

As I suddenly saw this man appearing in the mirror, I was overcome with the awareness that all the differences I had been aware of during my lifetime seemed so small compared with the similarities. As with a shock, I realized that I was indeed heir, successor, the one who is admired, feared, praised, and misunderstood by others, as my dad was by me.

I have had that kind of recognition when I see my fifty-seven year old face in the mirror. I was thinking the other day, watching Jonathan Pageau’s four-part Daily Wire series about the end of a world, about Pageau’s advice that we have to learn how to honor our ancestors even as we repent of their particular sins — this, as opposed to wanting to tear down their statues, as if they had nothing to teach us. This is how I relate to the memory of my own dear father. I may not ever have known a greater man in this life than him — nor a man who was more tragically flawed. In my journey, I hope to embody his strengths, and to repent of any of his weaknesses that linger within me. Because of his deathbed repentance, I have faith that one day, if I remain faithful, he will be there to welcome me into our Father’s house, with its many mansions.

Yet my repentance consists in part of refusing the despair that was the prodigal son’s until the moment of his father’s embrace, and the more subtle and complicated despair of the righteous elder son, who felt himself hard done by. For me, the elder son’s hardheartedness these days manifests, I think, in being too eager to see the darkness and disorder in the world, and its injustice.

For years now, I have focused on that darkness and disorder, partly in an effort to wake people up, so that we can resist it. But I told a friend recently that I know I’ve come to the end of that mission. There’s really not anything more I can say. This coming book, Living In Wonder, marks the end of that and the beginning of my next chapter as a writer, at least I hope. It will be a new role, one as someone who tries to show people hope, because it’s what I’m looking for myself.

Seems to me that Nouwen understands my next challenge:

As the Father, I have to dare to carry the responsibility of a spiritually adult person and dare to trust that the real joy and real fulfillment can only come from welcoming home those who have been hurt and wounded on their life’s journey, and loving them with a love that neither asks nor expects anything in return.

There is a dreadful emptiness in this spiritual fatherhood. No power, no success, no popularity, no easy satisfaction. But that same dreadful emptiness is also the place of true freedom. It is the place where there is “nothing left to lose,” where love has no strings attached, and where real spiritual strength is found.

More:

Living out this spiritual fatherhood requires the radical discipline of being home. As a self-rejecting person always in search of affirmation and affection, I find it impossible to love consistently without asking for something in return. But the discipline is precisely to give up wanting to accomplish this myself as a heroic feat. To claim for myself spiritual fatherhood and the authority of compassion that belongs to it, I have to let the rebellious younger son and the resentful elder son step up on the platform to receive the unconditional, forgiving love that the Father offers me, and to discover there the call to be home as my Father is home.

There it is. I have a lot of anger in my heart over what has happened, though it has been buried under a mound of ashes representing sheer emotional and spiritual exhaustion. Still, the embers burn, and I need to allow grace to extinguish them somehow. They somehow seem childish, in light of what I read today, both in Scripture and in Nouwen’s book, and in “reading” Rembrandt’s painting.

Dear readers, I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, which is truly a life-changing work. And if you haven’t yet read How Dante Can Save Your Life, it follows the same kind of trajectory, in that it applies the lesson of great and profound Christian art to the lives we actually live. You don’t have to have read Dante to get the message of my book. As with Nouwen’s journey through Rembrandt’s painting, my pilgrimage through Dante is one in which the reader learns that there is nothing any of us can do to be reconciled to the Father except get out of the way of God’s love.

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The dawn of the post-literate society - A VERY LONG READ
And the end of civilisation

The dawn of the post-literate society

And the end of civilisation

 
Sep 19, 2025
 
 
Heated Debates, Burning Books | The New Yorker
 

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death


The age of print

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.

Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.

Samuel Johnson: Literary Giant of the 18th Century” @ The HuntingtonLibrary - Alain.R.Truong
 

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

The counter revolution

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.

In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”

 

Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.

What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history.

Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).

Because ubiquitous mobile internet has destroyed these students’ attention spans and restricted the growth of their vocabularies, the rich and detailed knowledge stored in books is becoming inaccessible to many of them. A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children1.

An article published in The Atlantic, ‘The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books’ cites the characteristic experience of one professor:

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

“Most of our students”, according to another despairing assessment, “are functionally illiterate”. This chimes with everything I’ve heard in my own conversations with teachers and academics. One Oxbridge lecturer I spoke to described a “collapse in literacy” among his students.

The transmission of knowledge — the most ancient function of the university — is breaking down in front of our eyes. Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen whose works have been handed on for centuries can no longer reach the next generation of readers. They are losing the ability to understand them.

The tradition of learning is like a precious golden thread of knowledge running through human history linking reader to reader through time. It last snapped during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire as the barbarian tides beat against the frontier, cities shrank and libraries burned or decayed2. As the world of Rome’s educated elite fell apart, many writers and works of literature passed out of human memory — either to be lost forever or to be rediscovered hundreds of years later in the Renaissance.

That golden thread is breaking for the second time.

An intellectual tragedy

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

After the introduction of smartphones in the mid-2010s, global PISA scores — the most famous international measure of student ability — began to decline. As John Burn Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, students increasingly tell surveys that they struggle to think, learn and concentrate. You will notice the tell-tale mid-2010s inflection point:

The Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s.

A chart showing the PISA results
 

And, as Burn Murdoch says, these cognitive issues are not restricted to schools and universities. They affect everyone: “[the] decline in measures of reasoning and problem-solving is not confined to teenagers. Adults show a similar pattern, with declines visible across all age groups”.

 

Most intriguing — and alarming — is the case of IQ, which rose consistently throughout the twentieth century (the so-called “Flynn effect”) but which now seems to have begun to fall.

The result is not only the loss of information and intelligence, but a tragic impoverishing of the human experience.

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.

World without mind

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacycertain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

As an extreme example think of somebody trying to simply speak a famous work of philosophy. Say, Kant’s 900-page The Critique of Pure Reason or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It would be impossible to do. And also impossible to listen to.

To produce his great work Kant had to write down his ideas, scratch them out, think about them, refine them and then rework them over many years so they added up into a persuasive and logical whole.

To properly understand the book you have to be able to have it in front of you so you can re-read bits you don’t understand, check logical connections and meditate on important passages until you really take them in. This kind of advanced thinking is inseparable from reading and writing.

The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation3. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation.

As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

Walter Ong emphasised that writing cools and rationalises thought. If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. You can play emotive music or show harrowing images. Such appeals are not rational but human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Without the array of logic-defeating appeals available to podcasters and YouTubers, authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now). Books are far from perfect but they are much more closely bound to the imperatives of logical argument than any other means of human communication ever devised.

This is why Ong observed that pre-literate “oral” societies often strike visitors from literate countries as remarkably mystical, emotional, and antagonistic in their discourse and thinking4.

 

As books die, we seem to be returning to these “oral” habits of thought. Our discourse is collapsing into panic, hatred and tribal warfare. Anti-scientific thought thrives at the highest level of the American government. Promoters of irrationality and conspiracy theories such as Candace Owens and Russell Brand find vast and credulous audiences online.

Laid out on the page their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

The rise of these emotional and irrational styles of thinking poses a profound challenge to our culture and politics.

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

The end of creativity

The age of print was characterised by unprecedented dynamism and cultural richness. Reading is a foundation stone of the creativity and innovation that is fundamental to modernity.

It is not the case that for a society to benefit from the culture of print that every citizen must be a bookworm. And yet if one habit unites the leaders, inventors, scientists and artists who have forged our civilisation it is reading. Serious readers are over-represented in almost every area of human achievement.

Take great politicians: Teddy Roosevelt claimed to read a book a day, Winston Churchill set himself an ambitious programme of reading in philosophy, economics and history as a young man and continued to read voraciously throughout his life. Clement Attlee recalled that he read four books a week as a schoolboy.

The Books Beloved by David Bowie | Internet Archive Blogs
 

Or consider popular culture (not usually thought of as a particularly literary field of human endeavour). David Bowie read, in his own words, “voraciously”. “Every book I ever bought, I have. I can't throw it away”, he once said. “It's physically impossible to leave my hand!” A list Bowie wrote of his hundred favourite books includes works by William Faulkner, Tom Stoppard, DH Lawrence and TS Eliot.

In a recent book about his song-writing career Paul McCartney cited “Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Allen Ginsberg, of French symbolist writer Alfred Jarry, Eugene O’Neill and Henrik Ibsen” among the authors who had inspired him.

Thomas Edison read deeply throughout his life. So did Charles Darwin. So did Albert Einstein. Ironically, even Elon Musk claims that he was “raised by books”.

Reading enriches creative work by giving men and women of genius access to the vast and priceless trove of knowledge preserved in books — “the best that has been thought and said”. The discipline of reading equips them with the analytical tools to interrogate, refine and revolutionise that tradition.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, the invention of the printing press helped to catalyse a series of cultural revolutions which forged the modern world: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution. Other historians would add the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights and the industrial revolution.

Eisenstein explains how the tendency of reading to foster innovation played out in Renaissance universities. With the invention of printing students had increased access to books allowing “bright undergraduates to reach beyond their teachers’ grasp. Gifted students no longer needed to sit at the feet of a given master in order to learn a language or academic skill.” And so,

Students who took advantage of technical texts which served as silent instructors were less likely to defer to traditional authority and more receptive to innovating trends. Young minds provided with updated editions, especially of mathematical texts, began to surpass not only their own elders but the wisdom of ancients as well.

Modern students who are unable to read are once more reliant on the authority of their teachers and are less capable of racing ahead, innovating and questioning orthodoxies.

These students are just one symptom of the stagnant culture of the screen age which is characterised by simplicity, repetitiveness and shallowness. Its symptoms are observable all around us.

Pop songs in every genre are becoming shorter, simpler and more repetitive and films are being reduced to endlessly-repeated franchise formulas. Studies suggest that the number of “disruptive” and “transformative” inventions is declining. More money is spent on scientific research than ever in history but the rate of progress “is barely keeping pace with the past”.

Doubtless many factors are at work, but this is also precisely what you would expect of a generation of researchers who spent their childhoods glued to screens rather than reading or thinking.

Even books themselves are becoming less complex.

 

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.

Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present. Deprived of the critical tools to question and develop the insights of those who went before us, we are condemned to endlessly repeat and pastiche ourselves, superhero film by superhero film, repetitive pop song by repetitive pop song.

Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics.

The death of democracy

Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.

“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking.

This was what historians of the seventeenth century know as the “representational” culture of power, the highly visual system of monarchical propaganda which forced the fearsome and awe-inspiring image of the king onto his subjects. The regime displayed its power in parades, paintings, fire-work displays, statues and grandiose buildings.

Equestrian Portrait of Louis XIV by MIGNARD, Pierre
 

The system worked in an age before mass literacy. But as knowledge spread through society and the analytic, critical modes of thinking fostered by print took hold, the whole mental and cultural atmosphere which sustained the old order was burned away. People began to know too much. And to think too much.

The feudal order seems to be fundamentally incompatible with literacy. The historian Orlando Figes has noted that the English, French and Russian revolutions all occurred in societies in which literacy was approaching fifty per cent.

Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper chronicles the chaos unleashed on the old regime in France by the age of print. Knowledge spread through French society with disastrous effect: political prisoners wrote bestselling memoirs publicising their unjust incarceration by the state; ordinary people consumed pamphlets about the exorbitant and unjust wealth enjoyed by aristocrats; the government’s disastrous finances were suddenly debated by an incredulous and furious public rather than behind closed doors in the back rooms of Versailles.

Meanwhile the analytic, critical modes of thinking began to eat away at the mystical and emotional underpinnings of the old order. The philosophes and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, supported by a growing middle class readership, began to ask the kinds of critical questions that are pre-eminently print-based in their tone. Where does power come from? Why should some men have so much more than others? Why aren’t all men equal?

***It’s worth noting that this highly simplified account clearly excludes many of the factors the shape the unfolding of history: economics, climate, individual men and women, blind chance. Print alone cannot usher in peace and democracy (witness the consequences of the Russian revolution). And print cannot abolish the innate human tendencies towards partisanship and violence (witness the aftermath of the French revolution). Print is certainly not immune to fake news and conspiracy theories (witness the lead-up to the French revolution). ***

But you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.

Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them.

Postman cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 in which both presidential candidates spoke at incredible length and in remarkable detail as one of the summits of print culture:

Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas, a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed . . . on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.

When Postman was writing in the late 1980s, such debates were already impossible to imagine. Ironically the televised debates that he criticised as degraded, uninformative and over-emotional strike twenty-first century viewers as almost comically civilised and high minded.

 

Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.

TikTok, as the writer, Ian Leslie puts it is “rocket fuel for populists”.

Why does [TikTok] benefit populists disproportionately? Because, almost by definition, populism thrives on emotions, not thoughts; on feelings not sentences. Populists specialise in providing that rush of certainty you get when you know you’re right. They don’t want you to think. Thinking is where certainty goes to die.

The rational, dispassionate print-based liberal democratic order may not survive this revolution.

The Course of Empire (paintings) - Wikipedia
 

Into the moronic inferno

The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.

Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic.

Many people are now as suspicious of vaccines as the uneducated yokels of the eighteenth century satirised by the cartoonist James Gillray more than two hundred years ago.

File:The cow pock.jpg - Wikipedia
 

As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.

Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.

As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.

Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Welcome to the post-literate society.

1

When George Orwell reported on a newly-published study of children’s reading habits in 1940, he found that children were “voluntarily” reading works by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, GK Chesterton and Shakespeare. These children, he noted, were “aged between 12-15 and belonged to the poorest class in the community”.

2

I protest that I read my Peter Brown and accept this is a simplistic (though I hope rhetorically forceful) characterisation of late antiquity. But I also think recent fashionable attempts to rebrand the “dark ages” as the “light ages” can be a bit overdone. Literacy rates did decline in late antiquity.

3

People sometimes object that Socrates bemoaned the death of writing. Havelock’s detailed argument as set out in his book Preface to Plato is worth reading in full. One point he makes is that Socrates himself was the product of an intellectual climate already being profoundly influenced by writing. Plato, according to Havelock, was an active campaigner against pre-literate modes of thinking.

4

This is not to say literate societies are “better” or more intelligent than oral societies. As Ong writes, oral societies are capable of feats of memory that are staggering to outsiders. But it is true that literate habits of thought seem to be essential to the kind of advanced and complex civilisation we live in.

 

 

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October 04, 2025
Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence
From Konstantin Kisin's Sub Stack

Why They Will Never Be Honest About Islamist Violence

 
Oct 04, 2025
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Have you ever wondered why in the wake of every Islamist terrorist attack, our media and politicians bend over backwards to make the extraordinary claim that Islamism has nothing to do with Islam? The answer is a mixture of things, but the central reason is easy to understand if you think about it logically.

To avoid offending morons, let’s not talk about people and talk about apples instead. As you know, there are red apples, green apples and yellow apples. Let’s imagine for a second that a small percentage of green apples are poisonous and can injure and kill people. It is difficult to distinguish the toxic green apples from the other green apples which are perfectly “peaceful”, “law-abiding” and so forth.

Now imagine that you are the public health authority whose job it is to protect the public. If your concern is solving the problem of the small minority of toxic green apples, you would immediately do a number of things.

You might devote significant resources to identifying the toxic green apples and removing them from the supermarket shelves. You might commission thorough research into how and where the toxic green apples are grown. You might crack down very, very hard on anyone who knowingly participates in growing or distributing such apples. You might even say that while you are dealing with the problem of deaths caused by toxic green apples, bringing more green apples into the country is liable to worsen the public health crisis until suitable measures are identified which allow you to separate the bad green apples from the good ones.

This is how you would act if your primary concern was the safety of the public. But what if you, as the public health authority, had spent the preceding decades claiming that all apples are the same? That to suggest that a small minority of green apples are potentially toxic is fear-mongering and green-o-phobic? What if you had been openly encouraging unfiltered importation of green apples and actively resisted calls to thoroughly check whether such apples are in fact, digestible for your citizens? What if your mantra for the last 20 years has been that anyone who believes there may be significant variations between the toxicity of different types of apples is a bigot who must be suppressed for fear of emboldening the “far right”?

If you were, in fact, responsible for the fact that people were now being killed on the streets of your country by the small minority of toxic green apples, would you not do everything in your power to explain that the diversity of apples is our greatest strength? That the toxicity of green apples is nothing to do with them being green? That any doctor who suggests that the government should carefully regulate the importation of green apples specifically is a racist?

The central premise of our elite consensus is that we must continue to pretend that all apples are the same. No matter how many people pay for this lie with their lives.

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September 27, 2025
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More thoughts on Forgiveness
Thoughts from 2022 with a new addendum for 2025

Thoughts on Forgiveness from April of 2022 with a 2025 Addendum

In Cath-O-Land we are celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday. Be you a believer or not, do you think that people are defined by their worst traits or decisions and thereafter imprisoned by them? Once a murderer, always a murderer? Is there a path of redemption, rehabilitation or restitution for that person, or are those dark choices and acts irrevocable? For the victims of vile crimes, they are unforgettable, they can be experiences that are life changing or life ending.

I guess it depends on the circumstances. I am not a fan of letting criminals skate free. If you commit the crime, do the time. I know it sounds simple, and we live in a world of decaying justice and manipulations of the courts that can prompt all of us to be cynics about justice. Dial back the clocks just a century and domestic violence and abuse was often ignored unless it erupted into murder. If you saw your neighbors beating their children or a husband beating a spouse, it was often ignored unless dealt with specifically within the family. I am not even sure that was the case, but that certainly is the impression I got from listening to my parents and grandparents talk about abusive neighbors by today's standard.

 

Justice - Mercy - Forgiveness – Contrition - Reconciliation - Healing

Justice - everyone has to face their choices, good & bad. If you believe in a Divine Judge who knows all, no one skates free. Everyone must face their story and how they wrote it by their actions.

Mercy - One can find forgiveness of sins, make restitution for their crimes. In this life, or the next. No one is a prisoner to their past, but no one gets to ignore it either. Mercy is meant to lift us above our past, pull us back on the path, reset the world we live in even if our acts have shrunk that world by our choices. Some may only fine mercy by a life in prison because their acts make them unworthy of living among us. While not a fan of the death penalty, finality of life often opens the door to reflection. The mask comes off when you are going to die, are you a harden & hateful soul, or can you in your final moments have contrition for your acts? In my world, mercy is only going to be received when I am willing to provide it. Mercy flows through me, or it bypasses me. My choice.

Forgiveness - It does not ever mean that the wrong someone has committed against us is acceptable. Forgiveness is not asking us to close our eyes and pretend everything is ok. Forgiveness is the ability to see beyond the wound, to emancipate oneself from the memory that has become our mental prison, to let justice be in the hands of another when we cannot obtain it for ourselves. Forgiveness is a choice - we can decide to offer it or withhold it. few things are worse than letting someone who injured us live rent-free in our heads for a life, imprisoning us in an inescapable memory when we have the keys of our freedom in our own possession.

Contrition – You are sorry for your offense and take accountability for it and are willing to live with the consequences of it and the possible need to make amends for it. Contrition belongs to the perpetrator of the act, and the victim may freely tell them to the go to Hell if they please.  Your sorrow for your acts does not depend upon their recognition or reception of your repentance.  

Reconciliation - It takes two, and it is not always achievable. When forgiveness and contrition are experienced, there is the possibility of reconciliation. You can't be reconciled with someone with someone who fails to take account of their own actions. In a more perfect world, reconciliation is always the goal. You can't be reconciled with a person who is a slave to addiction, especially if that addiction is behavioral altering. The addiction will always come first until they leave it behind. If someone says they are sorry and they alter their acts, reconciliation is possible. But contrition without change is empty. Few things can heal our hearts more than real reconciliation, but it is something not entirely in our control, as all the best things in life are, others have to meet us on the path of their reconciliation and work through the mess and injury however great or small it might be.

Healing - Be it victim or perpetrator - there is healing. If you have a healthy mind & heart, you choose the acts that define you. You choose the emotional weight to give to those acts and how they roam about in your thoughts and feelings. No victim need be a prisoner to the worst crime committed against them. *Victimhood is the surest path to an unhappy life.* Perhaps for some it is inescapable because they have developed a mental illness that will ever prevent they from rising above the pain. But if you are not mentally ill, defining your life as a victim may be one of your worst choices. Healing for the perpetrator can only come when they face their acts and do what they can to make amends.

Well, that is a lot. If you read it all, you probably need another cup of coffee. As always comments are welcome, even if you disagree with me on some of the points. It is after all just my ramblings about it. I hope you have a great day my friend, fellow pilgrim and one willing to lead me some minutes to read this. Peace.

*2025 Addendum for the Coffee Talk Crew 

I couldn’t agree with Fred more than recklessly inviting evil into your life is stupid. Nothing could be more stupid than knowing beforehand that someone is going to do evil and you welcome it pretending that it somehow won’t take place.   I can agree that that type of naive wishful thinking is profoundly stupid.  Europe is doing that with Islamists and the Center & Right of American culture & politics does that too often with the LEFT. There is no such thing as pre-forgiveness. If you come to commit evil, I pray you are stopped.  If it takes you leaving life to protect those I love, I vote you go home to God first rather than my loved ones. I am not happy about not having a choice but violence, but violent men/women have to be stopped with violence, not nice words or hopeful prayers.  Pray for their souls, stop their actions. Contain their evil. Predatory evil needs to be identified and ended. 

I don’t think Charlie Kirk’s wife is stupid for forgiving the murderer of her husband.  She still wants him to face justice and punishment for his crimes, but she is not going to live in the wound created in her life by his vile act. She did not have to forgive; she could have chosen to wait on it or never offer it to the murderer. She made a choice, and one that happened early on because she is serious (not perfect) about her faith.  I admire hr for her seriouness, I don't think I could arrive at forgiveness that quickly. 

At the core of Christian Discipleship is the dynamic of forgiveness – contrition and reconciliation.  Disciples are aware of how much they have been forgiven by God. Disciples know that if they want to seek God’s mercy, they must offer it to others.  I don’t think it has to be an immediate thing, massive wounds of hatred, violence and evil take equally massive amounts of time, grace and healing to mend.  The wounded will know their scars forever, how they chose to think about them is a choice.

Most Christians, and all Disciples should know that forgiveness is essential if they pay any attention to the Our Father.  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I can’t imagine praying those words and not trying to live by them. Again, I don’t think it means forgiveness has to be immediate, thoughtless and a given, but it should be something or somewhere I hope to arrive in life.  I should want to forgive eventually even if the pain of the offense at the moment is too fresh, deep and crushing.

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