Paideia

Moving Paideia to Full Blown Blog

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:28:57 -0500

Sawdust Diet - an Interview with Leon Kass

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:19:00 -0500

What does it mean to be human?

I think that I would come at the question of our humanity partly through the essential human activities and the fundamental human relations. The fundamental human relations are partly given by the facts of our neediness and our mortality and our aspirations and our affections. Our needs drive us to have some relation to the world. Our mortality leads us to be mindful of time and also to provide for our replacement. Our aspirations and our attachments bring us in relation to other human beings, particularly those who give us life and those whom we befriend and love and those whom we beget and those communities which nurture us and which we serve and ultimately to some kind of relation to the divine. At the heart of all human lives are the activities of loving and working and learning. Going in reverse order, learning provides awareness and understanding of this astonishing place into which we have been thrown. Work is a particular kind of human effort to use our energies to make and do in order to make the world a more hospitable and better place. Our loves overcome our isolation, and in a deep way fulfill both our needs and our generous impulses to have our lives spill over into the lives of others.

How changeable is what it means to be human?

Things change a lot, but I tried to give the answer in terms of things that are enduring. It’s true that some cultures might make it easier to find meaningful work. It’s true that some cultures might find it easier to encourage real intimacy and friendship. It’s true that some cultures make it easier or more difficult to pursue the truth or to understand things. It’s possible that some cultures make it at once both easier and harder. Easier in the sense that more people than ever have an opportunity to learn and harder because there is so much rubbish that gets in the way of learning. I think I’m inclined to say that loving and working and learning—one could then add other things such as rejoicing and worshipping and some form of self-ruling—these are enduring human possibilities. These are more likely to flourish under some cultural conditions than others. But I would be inclined to say that there is something in the human soul that moves towards these things and the cultures that don’t give them room, let’s hope, [will be] rejected.

So, culturally, during your lifetime, what has dimmed the views of individuals seeking to appreciate and to recognize what makes them distinctly human and the value of that recognition.

I think the reigning intellectual orthodoxies today, outside of religious communities, say there is no permanent nature. The human animal is a historical animal and has no nature, only a history. The cultural differences are decisive and that we should be very slow to mistake our culturally determined view of what humanity is for the truth of what humanity is. We shouldn’t judge adversely other cultures who might put forth different ways of doing these things. And I think that the so-called cultural elite in America, and in the West more generally, has—in my lifetime, your lifetime—lost its nerve in being willing to defend a much more confident view that we were basically on the right track of emancipating human possibilities for learning and the pursuit of truth. Give people the economic wherewithal so that they can in fact flourish, humanly speaking. And precisely now that more and more people really have the opportunity to flourish, the cultural elite is basically saying that there really is no such thing as human flourishing: you do what you like, we’ll do what we like. Let’s not judge one another, lest we be judged. I think that the rise of relativism is especially sad because it undercuts the natural aspirations of young people. To say that there really is no such thing as the truth, there’s just your truth and my truth. To say that love is an illusion, that is it basically a form of exercise of power—that you should enter the world seeing the world solely through the lens of power. Or what was once thought to be either good or beautiful were [actually] merely positions of a ruling elite who imposed its way on others, I think is to feed hungry souls sawdust.

How do you see the role of technological development, or advancement reshaping the central features of humanity?

I have a mixed view of this. I’m generally thought to be an enemy of technology and that’s just silly. Nobody who wears glasses, communicates with his children on the phone, or is able to travel to see them, or enjoys hot running water can be an enemy of technology. In fact, as a now deceased colleague of mine put it—speaking of the advances and the improvement of human life that largely technology has been responsible for—“Leon, before the twentieth century, human life was impossible.” And what he meant was that the possibility of realizing our human potential was very truncated, if not quite impossible for all but the upper crust of society. And it’s now the case that the average American lives a healthier, more prosperous, more open human life than dukes and duchesses of two hundred years ago. For that, one has to be grateful. The question remains whether technology is simply neutral in lifting us up from poverty, sickness, and toil and thus enables us to make of ourselves whatever we want. Or whether it doesn’t also begin to change the aspirations, alter the sensibilities, affect the character of the people that it has so liberated. And there I think the jury is out.

…

Have you found your students grow and appreciate, or recognize, how these ideas and literature could impact their lives and their choices?

Teaching is one of these mysterious activities. You have no immediate idea of what’s really going on on the other side of the room even in conversational classes. You never know which remark moves somebody to think something and so on. It’s an activity one engages in out of hope and trust. We’ve had all kinds of ample testimony over…coming up close to 40 years of doing this from former students who have become our friends and from students that write absolutely out of the blue. I got an email just today from a fellow from the first class I taught at the University of Chicago who is now reading my Genesis book with a study group at his synagogue, and he writes to me saying, “I don’t know if you remember me but I can tell you what this and this and this has meant to me.” Well, I actually remember him as if it were yesterday because of something that he said in class. He’s the only person who has ever said, on a class on Aristotle’s Ethics, that, “Of course the way you get to be virtuous is through habituation—that’s what the Talmud teaches: ‘First you will do and then you will hear.’ All the other intellectuals think it all comes through the head and not through the doing.” This was his first class in a secular institution; he had been through yeshivas before.

an Interview with Leon Kass from Wunderkammer Magazine. Find it here.

The Law the Lawyers Know About

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:28:01 -0500

The Law the Lawyers Know About

The law the lawyers know about
Is property and land;
But why the leaves are on the trees,
And why the wind disturbs the seas,
Why honey is the food of bees,
Why horses have such tender knees,
Why winters come and rivers freeze,
Why Faith is more than what one sees,
And Hope survives the worst disease,
And Charity is more than these,
    They do not understand.

 	-- H.D.C. Pepler

St. Basil the Great - from Cathedral in Ohrid

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:04:11 -0400

St. Basil the Great - from Cathedral in Ohrid

"The Sirens" - Robinson Jeffers

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:13:09 -0400

Perhaps we desire death: or why is poison so sweet?

Why do the little Sirens

Make kindlier music, for a man caught in the net of the world

Between news-cast and work-desk,-

The little chirping Sirens, alcohol, amusement, opiates,

And carefully sterilized lust,-

Than the angels of life? Really it is rather strange, for the angels

Have all the power on their side.

All the importance:- men turn away from them, preferring their own

Vulgar inventions, the little

Trivial Sirens. Here is another sign that the age needs renewal.

"This is the very rest and life of the saints..."- St Augustine

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:28:12 -0400

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall by inheritance possess the earth: that earth, I suppose, of which it is said in the Psalm, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. For it signifies a certain firmness and stability of the perpetual inheritance, where the soul, by means of a good disposition, rests, as it were, in its own place, just as the body rests on the earth, and is nourished from it with its own food, as the body from the earth. This is the very rest and life of the saints. Then, the meek are those who yield to acts of wickedness, and do not resist evil, but overcome evil with good. Let those, then, who are not meek quarrel and fight for earthly and temporal things; but blessed are the meek, for they shall by inheritance possess the earth, from which they cannot be driven out.”

- from St Augustine’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount

Pokrov

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:45:51 -0400

Pokrov

El Greco - The Annunciation

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:23:50 -0400

El Greco - The Annunciation

"Where art thou?"

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:09:32 -0400

“Being the source of goodness, God, even after our failures, calls us anew, not effacing entirely from our mind the knowledge of good, even if we have turned away from virtue through sin. This is what God, at present, also does for Adam in calling him although he has hidden himself, saying to him: ‘Adam, where art thou?’ Adam, in fact, had been placed there by God for the purpose of working and guarding Paradise; he had received this place from Him to be his own. Having distanced himself from there by disobedience, it is proper that he should hear from God: ‘Where art thou?’” -

Didymus the Blind

Against School! - John Taylor Gatto

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:30:21 -0400

How public education cripples our kids, and why

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

….

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.

These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States … and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern

…

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

There you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

…

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

- Read whole text here.

Intentional Community?

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:21:51 -0400

The Ochlophobist posted this via Benjamin’s original post

On intentional community:

…I’m much more interested in the results of accidental communities that have formed by fate and fortune and circumstance…I think the idea that you can have an intentional community is about as misleading as saying you can have an intentional life. If you’re going to have a decent and stable community, you’ve got to produce the cultural and social forms by which to deal with the unexpected and the undesirable. The intentional community idea assumes that when you say love your neighbor as yourself, you have some kind of right to pick your neighbor. I think the ideal of loving your neighbor has to take on the possibility that he may be somebody you’re going to have great difficulty loving or liking or even tolerating.
- Wendell Berry - from an interview in Mother Earth News, 1973

I lived in two intentional communities during my twenties, one missionary Evangelical and one liberal Catholic, and while I learned a great deal from those experiences, Berry’s words ring quite true to me. I think one of the most disturbing trends within American Christianity of late (and this definitely includes Orthodoxy in America) is all of this effort expended to create authenticity and construct community. In such a milieu, everything becomes caricature, and what is real diminishes. We have become a society of cliques and fetishes (we submerse ourselves in associations of persons who like to consume what we like to consume), in which everything, even most of our social life, is approached in a manner that essentially brands things, and promotes endless consumer-like choices.

the awkward ones who remain

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:07:00 -0400

The East Anglians

Situated on the east coast of Great Britain, East Anglia is one of the country’s chief agricultural regions. The flat landscape, massive skies and long farming heritage make East Anglia the closest place Britain has to a prairie.

For the last nine years I have been traveling the back roads of rural East Anglia, passing down drove and lane, track and way. On my journeys I discovered the remnants of an agrarian community that was once widespread throughout this area. For most people this is a world that no longer exists. It is where traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon, and the identity of the people is intimately shaped by the land on which they live and work. Small-time farmers, reed cutters and rabbit catchers, these are the East Anglians — the forgotten people of the flatlands who continue to work the land because the need to is in their blood.

Central to an agrarian culture is the idea of land: not just working the land, living on the land and owning the land (all which are important) — but that much deeper concept of being part of the land; the process of it becoming both physically and psychologically ingrained in the human experience. It is impossible to escape the presence of the landscape. It creeps from the fields into the home. It enters through an open window, or a crack under the door; embedded in the palm of a hand, or on the sole of a boot. Leeks sprout from the curtains and the tabletop is fenland peat. The agrarian farmers I have come to know are so deeply rooted to the land, it is as if they grew out of the soil like a tree. Such an intimate relationship comes from what the rural writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry, describes as “knowledge in place for a long time.”

To enter into the agrarian world of the East Anglians is to experience a rural culture that has a direct lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the early Middle Ages. The agrarian farmer always has one foot firmly planted in the past. The old ways are proven to work and can therefore be relied upon. Everything is visibly ingrained with history. Buildings are often cobbled together and are a ramshackle mix of wood, tin and stone. And the agricultural machinery is a patchwork of rust, mud and oil stains in which the past is embedded.

The agrarian farmer knows in fine detail the histories and biographies of his local landscape. After years of familiarity with the land he knows what is the best cycle of crop rotation on any particular field, where it lies wet in winter and how best to plow, sow, hoe and harvest that field to reap the best from it. Unaided by any map, he can negotiate the complex network of local droves and tracks by day and night, and walk the fields and woodlands, fen and marsh with equal agility. Inside the agrarian mind are the local wind patterns and river currents; along with the life stories of the local inhabitants, wildlife habitats and tree and plant species past and present. I have been told of farmers who have come and gone, from what direction the fox will come to steal a chicken and who planted a particular oak tree and when.

But during the last 60 years an agrarian way of life has become increasingly irrelevant in a modern society, and the East Anglians find themselves living on the margins. Most of the small family farms are now gone, while the fields of agribusiness have grown bigger, swallowing up the landscape as they go. The result is the depopulation of the rural landscape, and with it the loss of the knowledge of local place and the traditional skills of working the land that are so important to an agrarian culture. As one old-time farmer said to me, “It’s just one big tractor now and a thousand acres. There’s nobody on the land today. But,” he continued, “there will always be those that straggle on — the awkward ones who remain.”

I have spent many hours in the fields, patiently watching how man and the landscape intimately shape one another. If I look closely, occasionally I am offered a glimpse into the mystery of this ancient relationship. It is a fleeting moment; I click the shutter, and I wait…. — Justin Partyka

Justin Partyka (find The East Anglian gallery)

(h/t Ricky Irvine)

Андрей Рублёв

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:00:18 -0400

Андрей Рублёв

Sloterdijk on American Christianity

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:04:42 -0400

“With increasing success comes increasing entropy. Under its influence, the universalist potential of faith is confirmed and simultaneously pensioned off by the great church organizations. Entropic phenomena are also unmistakably responsible for the changing face of faith in the USA, where, as Harold Bloom incisively observed, the last fifty years have seen a reshaping of Protestant Christianity into a post-Christian ‘American religion’ with pronounced Gnostic, individualistic and Machiavellist aspects. Here, the faith of the Father has almost entirely disappeared, while the narcissistic realm of the Son no longer tolerates resistance. If there were an American trinity it would consist of Jesus, Machiavelli and the spirit of money. The postmodern credo was exemplified in exemplary fashion by the Afro-American actor Forest Whitaker when he gave his speech of thanks upon receiving the Oscar for the best leading role in 2007, closing with the words: ‘And I thank God for always believing in me.’”

- Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal, 68.

h/t

Archimandrite Kyprian Kern available in English!

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:54:19 -0400

The Orthodox Research Institute is pleased to announce the publication of a new book:

Orthodox Pastoral Service
By Archimandrite Kyprian Kern
Translated by Mary Goddard
Edited by Fr. William C. Mills

Paperback (September 2009)
ISBN: 978-1-933275-32-1
Price: $13.95 + S&H (USD)

Nearly fifty years ago, the Eastern Orthodox monk and theologian, Archimandrite Kyprian Kern, explored pertinent issues regarding pastoral ministry. Kern’s writings on clericalism and problems with the abuse of power and authority in the Church, for example, are as fresh today as when they were first written. Kern is probably the least known among Orthodox theologians in the West; however, his voice is now being heard for the first time in English and hopefully will inspire and encourage a new generation of clergy and laity who seek to better understand ministry in an Orthodox Christian context. Orthodox Pastoral Service is a collection of lecture notes from Kern’s classes in pastoral ministry. In this book, Kern deals with important issues such as clericalism, the importance of the Eucharist for the life of the priest, and emphasis on the intellectual, spiritual, and personal preparation for the priesthood. Finally, one could look at this book as a historical document. On this level, Kern has left us with a detailed exposition of pastoral ministry in 19th century Russia.

To order this book or other books from the Orthodox Research Institute, visit our online bookstore at http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/store/oripress.htm.

New St Maximus the Confessor Translation

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:59:00 -0400

click!

st sergius of radonezh

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:25:14 -0400

st sergius of radonezh

trinity lavra

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:21:25 -0400

trinity lavra

A Creed for Modern Times

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:45:42 -0400

We believe in one Market, the Almighty,
Maker of heaven on Earth,
Of all that is, priced and branded,
True growth from true growth,
Of one being with the Economy.
From this, all value is added.

We believe in Deregulation, once and for all,
The only way to prosperity.
For us and for our salvation,
Reagan and Thatcher were elected
And were made gods.
In their decade they legislated
To take away our economic sins.
They were crucified by the Liberal Media,
But rose again, in accordance with their manifestos.
They ascended in the polls
And are seated at the right hand of Milton Friedman.

We believe in the Invisible Hand,
The giver of economic life.
It has spoken through our profits.
It proceeds from the Law of the Deregulated Market,
And with the Market is worshipped and glorified.

We believe in one Globalised Economy.
We believe in one key business driver
For the increase in Gross Domestic Product.
We acknowledge one bottom line
For the measurement of wealth.
We look for the resurgence of executive compensation packages
And the life of the financial years to come.

Amen.

- ANDREW BRADSTOCK.

from here, h/t halden doerge

Tolstoy Vs. Dostoevsky?? david bentley hart

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:42:36 -0400

VS.

David Bentley Hart is at it again!

HERE