Lois Lowry on living the prequel to The Giver.
Wisdom and Folly in Christian Responses to Cornoavirus, in which you will find:
The fool will not carefully consider opposing positions to discover what element of wisdom might lie within them, but will leap at whatever excuse he can find—the tone, the political alignment, or the personality of the speaker, etc., etc.—to dismiss and ignore them. Ultimately, whether he realizes it or not, he hates wisdom, as the task of wisdom is discomforting for him and he will avoid it at all costs. By contrast, the wise will endure considerable discomfort to seek wisdom wherever it is to be found. He will willingly expose himself to scathing rebuke, to embarrassing correction, to social alienation, or to the loss of pride entailed in learning from his sharpest critics or opponents or climbing down from former stances, if only he can grow in wisdom.
And finally, the latest long thoughtful post from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative: Masks as Condensed Symbols. I really think he's onto something here. This post, as usual, is long but very worthwhile and contains a long quotation from an emailer:
To me, it seems as though masking (or not masking) is the ultimate condensed symbol. It’s the bog Irish doing their Friday fast. It’s not really about what they do or don’t believe about masks, it’s about stating their non-eliteness. This has led me to a couple of thoughts. One is that a lot of the more thoughtful mask-skeptics are treating this as an ideological discussion and not as an actual, life-and-death issue, which I think is very emblematic of Ross Douthat’s decadent society–we can’t rouse ourselves out of this torpor where everything is theoretical and slotted into endlessly recycled partisan internet fights.
A lot of truth in that, I think. The emailer has a lot more to say, and then Dreher much more still. Read the whole thing.
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