touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
A human who sins is less human after he succumbs than he was before. Still, there is a persistent, though imbecile, way of speaking in which some public figure who has an adulterous affair or a personal foible come to light thereby reveals a "human side" of himself. In fact, it is in keeping his commitments and displaying evidence of virtue that a man is most fully human; in giving in to temptations, even trivial or petty ones, he becomes that much more bestial.
When we fall, we fall from a human dignity, not an angelic one; our skid may well end at a level of animal savagery, but we never "tumble down" into humanity—and not because pigs are of themselves wickeder than men, but because the elevator, so to speak, was already at that floor.
—Paul Mankowski, S.J.
"Why the Immaculate Conception" (1990), reprinted in Jesuit at Large (2021)
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