It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know). 

A great many people (not you) do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others: but even while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy Our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, our jokes, and the birds song and the frosty sunrise.

-C.S. Lewis, Letter to Bede Griffiths (December 20, 1946)

...evolution is replete with telos (and from natural telos, Thomas' Fifth Way takes us interesting places. It was simply that the "ultra-Darwinians" have taken a perfectly serviceable scientific theory and deformed it into a metaphysical stance.

Recall what Thomas wrote in passing regarding the emergence of new things: Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning.(Summa theologica, Part I Q73 A1 reply3) His point was, following Augustine, that God had endowed matter with natures capable of acting directly, and so new things could arise from the natural powers created in the beginning. He was wrong about the "putrefaction," but "mutation" is surely another form of corruption, and "the stars and elements" will do for "material bodies."

-Mike Flynn

"But the kids can't take it if we don't give it to them"

[A little longer quote than usual, but very perceptive.]

I strayed from the church, but don’t think I forgot my religious training. I just overlooked it. I prayed often and hard, but like many irrespressible young fellows, the swift tempo of living shoved religion into the background.

So what good was all the hard work and ceaseless interest of the Brothers, people would argue? You can’t make kids religious, they say, because it just won’t take. Send kids to Sunday School and they too often end up hating it and the church.

Don’t you believe it. As far as I’m concerned, and I think as far as most kids go, once religion sinks in, it stays there–deep down. The lads who get religious training, get it where it counts–in the roots. They may fail it, but it never fails them.

When the score is against them, or they get a bum pitch, that unfailing Something inside will be there to draw on.

I’ve seen it with kids. I know from the letters they write me.

The more I think of it, the more important I feel it is to give kids “the works” as far as religion is concerned. They’ll never want to be holy–they’ll act like tough monkeys in contrast, but somewhere inside will be a solid little chapel.

It may get dusty from neglect, but the time will come when the door will be opened with much relief. But the kids can’t take it, if we don’t give it to them.

-Babe Ruth [Source]

There are countless horrible things happening all over the country, and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.

-Auberon Waugh

People who actually study history know that history doesn’t pick sides.

-Tom Simon

Every now and then someone boasts "I have an absolutely new idea." Three answers may be given. One is "Treat it kindly, it is in a strange place." The other is "Beginner's luck." And the third and best answer is "Go back and see how the ancients put it."

-Fulton Sheen, Life is Worth Living (1953)

 A fashion is something that goes in one year and out another.

-Fulton Sheen, Life is Worth Living, Fourth Series (1956)

One "Blessed be God" in times of adversity, is worth more than a thousand acts of gratitude in times of prosperity

-St. John of Avila (as quoted in St. Alphonsus Liguori's booklet Uniformity with God's Will)

I prefer traditional Church music in the liturgy. I believe that just as we conduct ourselves and dress in a reverent manner when we go to Mass, we should also have music to reflect that, oriented vertically, ad orientam, towards God. Rock music, to me, is oriented horizontally. It's strictly entertainment. I love rock and roll music, and jazz, etc., but they're forms of entertainment, and they draw the eye and attention towards the performers. We as Catholics are asked that while we live IN this world, we shouldn't be OF the world. What other place on earth should that phrase ring true but in the presence of the Eucharist? The music in church should be set apart, as a break from "the World," so we can focus on the fact that we're receiving Christ's body and blood and this isn't some kind of causal party.

-Matthew Kelly (drummer for the "Dropkick Murphys")
Gilbert, January/February 2023, pp. 14-15

It’s easier and more enjoyable to fantasize about the moral improvements one would bring about with more power than to bring about the actual moral improvements over which one has power.

-James Chastek

[H/T Mike Flynn]

YouTube: We fight misinformation by censoring videos we disagree with.
Every YouTube Ad: This crazy new discovery melts belly fat while you sleep.

-Brian Holdsworth

Of all forms of stupidity the most crass, the most tedious, and yet the most exasperating is learned stupidity; a pompous furniture of accumulated facts unrelated by the intelligence. We all know the symptoms. There is the use of a jargon to impress the gaping public and the substitution of specialist unfamiliar terms for plain English. There is the constant respectful allusion by one pedant to this, that and the other pedant, so as to present the whole herd of them as a sort of sacred college....

The soul of the error is a substitution of hypothesis for fact: the putting forward of what is in truth mere guesswork as affirmations, and the spinning of endless theories, any one of which is held respectable on condition that it contradicts traditional knowledge and the plain statements of the past. 

The Bible has been made a playground, apparently inexhaustible in its resources for people of this kind. They are so lost to common sense that they solemnly present great poems as being the products not of poets but of committees. Splendid passages of descriptive prose they imagine to have been pierced together out of discordant fragments. They will talk in the most familiar way of wholly imaginary documents and by their aid dissolve all straightforward narrative, and incidentally all the dignity of just expression.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Battleground