But it feels so right!

“‘Luke! Trust your feelings!’ As we know, Luke does what he is told, and the galaxy is saved. How fortunate that he did not trust his mind and skill, as he was tempted to, because then the evil empire would have won. The Star Wars movies express a view of how to live, a morality of feeling, found far beyond the perimeter of Dreamworks studio. As Keats wrote to a friend, ‘O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.’

“The morality of feelings turns out to be quite ecumenical. From a Roman Catholic web site advising young people how to recognize the call of God: ‘Listen to your feelings.’ From a young evangelical’s letter to a college magazine: ‘I became convinced that he is the guy God wants me to marry . . .’ From a letter I received from a self-described witch, explaining why she converted to Wicca: ‘I enjoy it very much. I am no longer sad or lonely.’ From the New Age best-seller of Neale Donald Walsch: ‘Passion is God wanting to say “hi” . . .’

“The assumption common to all of these is that a monstrous idol of cold deliberation has all of us in its thrall. We must break the shackles of rationality and burst the doors of thought to bask in the warm, clear light of our feelings. . . .

“Although our feelings are a part of our inbuilt design, what the moralities of feelings try to do is make sense of them in terms that are alien to our design—in terms that diminish, or dilute, or deny our dependence on the One who inbuilt and understands it. Rather than asking what part feelings play in the big picture, they make feelings themselves the big picture. In a word, the moralities of feelings are forms and expressions of our rebellion against our Maker.”

—J. Budziszewski in First Things, November 2002.

Was Jesus an American?

“Some years ago, at the University of California San Diego, a young woman raised her hand in the middle of a seminar I was then teaching on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era. She seemed disturbed by something. ‘I know you’re all going to think this is crazy,’ she said, ‘but I always thought Jesus was an American.’

“A lovely moment. What she had articulated, as succinctly as I had ever heard it articulated, was the spirit behind three and a half centuries of American history: America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen above all nations of the world for a special dispensation. What she had expressed, with almost poetic compaction, was the core myth of America.”

—Mark Slouka, teacher and author, in Harper’s, September 2002, quoted in Context, November 15, 2002.

Quote

“How to achieve ‘unity of life’? You start by giving over space in your crowded schedule of work and family duties to prayer and the sacraments. But even people who pray daily can still fence off their praying and working lives in separate compartments. Unity of life means bringing together our work and our prayer so that our prayer includes our work and our work can be offered as prayer. Work can then be carried out for the sake of God and in the service of others. A strong interior life is like a bubbling spring—it spills out naturally on the ground around it.”

—Jack Volerno, in The Tablet, September 7, 2002.

X-rated prayer?

“A durable language of prayer must meet the difficulty of the task with an answering difficulty; it must defend the perishable with a strength that attempts the imperishable. Prayer that attempts less—prayer that falsifies the emotions, or plugs in a political shorthand, or otherwise stands between us and our full energies—is a sketch, a simulation, even a pornography, of worship.

“I mean this quite literally. Pornography, after all, is all subject matter and no reflection: a stylized, schematic representation of sex that offers everything but the problematic essentials—the body and consent of a person we know. Kitsch liturgy also offers everything but the problematic essentials—the dependence of every good thing in our lives on our undependable good acts, and the uncanniness and danger of facing a God who knows us.”

—Catherine Madsen, quoted in Context, May 15, 2001.

Go ahead, say it

“The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word ‘God’ without reserve or embarrassment, certainly without adolescent resentment: rather with some sense of communion, with reverence, and with joy.”