Thank you for taking the time to write all of this, and for sharing your seemingly bottomless well of wisdom.

Radical Indiviualism+ Radical Islam+Moral Relativism =Upcoming Bondage like We’ve Never Known Before.

Perhaps, as Vicky says, the Lord will come sooner rather later, but either way, things are lining up for a dark period of unknown proportions. God help us.

Thank you so much for continuing to write all this.

It is also April Fool’s Day. The significance of that in connection with deception needs nothing more than an interesting footnote. If I listen closely I can hear thunderous belly laughing coming from Heaven.

This one made me think of Reinhold Neibuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society which I came to very late in life. Had I found it in my younger days my youthful angst about many of what I perceived to be horrible social trends would have been assuaged. Neibuhr was, of course, the writer of the Serenety Prayer as well as being an influence on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I did a site search of First Things looking for an essay I once linked to there in which Moral Man and Immoral Society was clearly, succinctly summarized, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I did, however come up with three other writers referring to the same source. Edward T. Oakes in 1993, Wilfred M. McClay in 2002, and Matthew Berke in 2000. This last link is shortest and quickest to digest.

Neibuhr seems to have tripped across a timeless principle. I think it might be possible to sift history through his observation and discover that from the start of written records individual standards of behavior have invariably been higher than collective behavior. Oh, from time to time we clump together for flag, race, church or nation, but that’s not quite the same dynamic as individual sacrifice that results in true martyrdom.

First Things is really the voice of Fr. Neuhaus. So to be fair, you might want to wade through some of his endless remarks as well. He has a discursive style that never tires, but he makes trenchant observations that provoke one to think. Been doing it for years, too. This piece in 1992 came up in my search because it contained a “Neibuhr” reference, although it was not the one for which I was looking. It contains this nugget.

Speaking at Trinity Church, Wall Street, former President Jimmy Carter got a big hand when he criticized the United Nations for condoning war in the Gulf “without totally exploring a peaceful resolution to the conflict.” Like, for example, Saddam Hussein might have been willing to agree to be very careful in using the nuclear weapons that, it is now generally acknowledged, were within months of being ready for deployment.

Remember, he’s writing fifteen years ago, long before recent memory. Most of the casualties of the war in Iraq were toddlers at the time. It is easy to criticize mistakes in retrospect, but we often discover that making those collective mistakes required a lot of denial about trends observed by individuals but ignored by our collective indifference.