touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn't become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there's no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.
—Alan Jacobs
Snakes and Ladders blog (June 26, 2017)
— Society — Commonplaces #96 — Sept/Oct 2021 —
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