Your adversary

What interests of your adversary overlap with your own? Expand the pie before you divide it.

Better Loves

We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.

David Brooks, The Road to Character 

The attribute of the strong

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. -Mahatma Gandhi 

The terrifying truth

Monday, January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Introducing a (60 Minutes) story about Nazi Adolf Eichmann, a principle architect of the Holocaust, (Mike) Wallace posed a central question at the program’s outset: “How is it possible…for a man to act as Eichmann acted?...Was he a monster? A madman? Or was he perhaps something even more terrifying: was he normal?”

Normal? The executioner of millions of Jews normal? Most self-respecting viewers would be outraged at the very thought.

The most startling answer to Wallace’s shocking question came in an interview with Yehiel Dinur, a concentration camp survivor who testified against Eichmann at the Nuremburg trials. A film clip from Eichmann’s 1961 trial showed Dinur walking into the courtroom, stopping short, seeing Eichmann for the first time since the Nazi had sent him to Auschwitz eighteen years earlier. Dinur began to sob uncontrollably, then fainted, collapsing in a heap in the floor a sthe presiding judicial officer pounded his gavel for order in the crowded courtroom.

Was Dinur overcome by hatred? Fear? Horrid memories?

No; it was none of these. Rather, as Dinur explained to Wallace, all at once he realized Eichmann was not the godlike army officer who had sent so many to their deaths. This Eichmann was an ordinary man. “I was afraid about myself,” said Dinur “… I saw that I am capable to do this. I am…exactly like he.”

Wallace’s subsequent summation of Dinur’s terrible discovery – “Eichmann is in all of us” – is a horrifying statement; but it indeed captures the central truth about man’s nature.

Charles Colson, Who Speaks for God?

100 percent

100% of the shots you don't take, don't go in. -Wayne Gretzky (born Jan. 26, 1961)

The Set Up

We set up harsh and unkind rules against ourselves. No one is born without faults. –Homer

The Christian Ghetto

We (the church) have created a phenomenal subculture with our own media, entertainment, educational system, and political hierarchy so that we have the sense that we're doing a lot. But what we've really done is create a ghetto that is easily dismissed by the rest of society. -Bob Briner, Roaring Lambs

one side of the moon

We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon. -Walter Bagehot 

Illusions of Patterns

The human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that conform it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken.  

Francis Bacon, born: Jan. 22, 1561

Shakespeare & the Incarnation

If Shakespeare and Hamlet could ever meet, it must be Shakespeare’s doing. Hamlet could initiate nothing.. Shakespeare could, in principle, make himself appear as Author within the play, and write a dialogue between Hamlet and himself. The “Shakespeare” within the play would of course be at once Shakespeare and one of Shakespeare’s creatures. It would bear some analogy to Incarnation. 

CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Being Ourselves

I began to see that I, and the people I know, are most winsome in all our intimate relations when we are unconsciously being ourselves with other people and accepting them just as they are without trying to manipulate or change them in any way.

Keith Miller, A Taste of New Wine

Wrong Turns

With each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for (travelers) to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn, and must accept this fact that they have wasted energy and time.

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man

I feel His pleasure

I believe God made me for a purpose.. and when I run I feel His pleasure. –Eric Liddell, Olympic Gold Medalist, born Jan. 16, 1902

Conspiracy Theories

A conspiracy theory is an attempt to force a story on a set of disparate, though often distantly related facts and observations. But the real world is not a narrative, not a clever mystery to be unraveled by amateur detectives. Every baroque edifice of conspiracy rests upon a foundational belief that there is a singular truth that diligent investigation will reveal, even if the shape of that truth branches and swirls in an infinite fractal. What this mindset cannot accept is that there may be many simple truths for many disturbing facts.

Jacob Bacharach writing in The Outline

looking and learning

We learn more from looking for the answer to the question than we do from learning the answer itself. -Lloyd Alexander

Fame

Leonardo da Vinci agreed with Young Thug about celebrity being life's game-changing apex, and he further believed that the rich and powerful, by pursuing land and money, miss the whole point of existence. “How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches that their fame might be everlasting?”   

The internet is a sprawling and anarchic record. In a few decades the internet has swallowed the record, and become coextensive with it. When no trace of something exists online, can it be said to be famous? Inconceivable. Can it be said to even exist? “Pics or it didn't happen” is a stock response to an improbable story told online. To become history, experience must first become pixels.  

Virginia Heffernan writing in Wired 

A stone wall

We may be up against a stone wall, but we don't have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to. – William Glasser 

The play

We keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows. – CS Lewis

Learning to adopt

Today’s students need universities and colleges that will help them navigate a world where constant changes are the norm and where learning how to adapt is the central problem of living and of citizenship. The idea that the college years should be primarily about potential is not idealistic or naive; it is prescient.

Caitlin Zaloom, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost 

Action

Action is the antidote to despair. -Joan Baez (born Jan. 9, 1941)