What does it mean to cure?
#Health #DownSyndrom #Abortion
Some thoughts on Augustine, Pear trees, and Cemeteries.
#quote #PlatoYep! Socrates said that the best men are the ones who have no desire to go into politics but are thrust into it because they don't want to be ruled by bad men.
Column for this weekend on my Substack app.
JOSEPH HAMRICK
MAY 18, 2024
I recently purchased a newer translation of Augustine’s Confessions, a masterful autobiography that searches the depths and heights of the human soul in its running from and searching for God.
It reminded me of a column I wrote, nearly five years ago now, while on vacation in Kentucky at the Ark Encounter. I wrote and typed away then while Jesse was learning a new addiction – playing the game NERTS with my siblings.
Here is what I wrote then. I think it is apt for today as well.
The boys wove through the rows of headstones and flowers that adorned them, tagging indiscriminately with blue spray-paint the names of people long dead and recently buried.
This place, Rosemound Cemetery in Commerce, where the bodies of the once-living are helpless to protect, was invaded by two (as far as we can tell) boys who came not to mourn, but to desecrate the headstones of the dead.
Many, if not most, crimes can be logically understood. Stealing food to feed one’s family, though wrong, still evokes sympathy from me when I read of their arrest in the newspaper or my Face 
book newsfeed. Vandalism, however, elicits other emotions. The crime serves no practical purpose except to please the heart of the vandal. To steal a car at least serves a practical purpose: though in the wrongful hands, the car is still being used according to its purpose. To slash its tires serves no purpose. The car can no longer be used by neither the thief nor its rightful owner.
This story caused me to recall another instance of pure vandalism, of committing a crime, not to serve some practical end, but to commit a crime for the sake of doing something wrong.
“Pre-Christian paganism is a love poem to a God who remained hidden, or it was an attempt to gain the favour of the divine powers whose presence man felt about him. The new paganism is a declaration of war against a God who has revealed Himself.”
Sigrid Undset, the great 20th Century Norwegian novelist and Historian.
This column is a collection of a few quick hit reactions and reflections on some things I’ve recently seen across my screen.
Of Bears, Cultural Christians, and the danger of the culture war turning us into Ephesians.
Of Bears
I’m late to the game, as I usually am, to put my two cents into this discussion. The background is this: a gentlemen uploaded a video of him walking around asking a simple question to women in the street: If you’re walking in the woods alone, would you rather meet a man or a bear?
The question seems absurd, and, at f 
irst listen, the answers seem just as. Who would pick to meet a bear over a man?
The talk surrounding this question has been sadly predictable. Feminists say it’s because men are all horrible that they’d rather meet with a bear, and the other side, the “red pill” men so-called, say they sympathize with the bear for having to spend time with women.
Two-dimensional answers to a question that’s surprising in its complexity.
I have two thoughts.
https://josephhamrick.substack.com/p/question-answers-reflect-cultural
Fantastic, worthwhile read.
On living life slower.
In 1847, a decision was made in Whitehall. It would change the destiny of the small island of Alderney, 150 miles away.
Today, as back then, no one knows about Alderney. From what I can tell, the residents like it that way – mostly. The only reason I know the place is my ancestry. On Dad’s side, my family has been there since at least the 1500s. It’s the northernmost of the Channel Islands – part of the British Isles, but not of the United Kingdom. It falls within the Bailiwick of Guernsey, which, alongside Jersey and the Isle of Man, is one of the United Kingdom’s Crown Dependencies.
Despite being British, it lies just ten miles from the French coast, compared to sixty from the English. At just three and a half miles by a mile and a half in size, with a population of only around two thousand, “The Rock” is a true haven – a small-scale place in a large-scale world. While the world suffered from months of lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, life on Alderney continued (mostly) as normal.
Life seems slower here. The shops close on Sundays. And at lunchtime. And at whatever other time takes the shopkeeper’s fancy. Air travel is infrequent, and a sudden fog rising off the Atlantic, or a gremlin in the engine of one of the only two commercial planes that fly there, is enough to keep you stranded for a day or two. There is only one cash machine. It might strike you as the last holdout of a more traditional way of life.
But its official websites boast of its appeal to remote workers, its superfast broadband and great transport connections. You might want to get away from the world in Alderney, but the world will find you. Alderney’s a proud part of the large-scale world, and it has been since that fateful decision in 1847.
When the planes are working and the air is clear, the first thing you see when you fly toward Alderney from the north is the breakwater.
#England #Christianity #Purpose
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/breakwater
My most recent piece of Substack.
On Dostoevsky's Youths, Warnings, and Dream:
These are the young men of today, who consider this life is all there is, so we ought to either get busy living or get busy dying. They are the self-pleasing nihilists, the rotted fruits of a decadent society that no longer knows up from down or right from wrong.
After those two made their crass remarks, Dostoevsky wrote that a third suddenly arose and said, with piercing insight:
“Why have we got so many people hanging or shooting themselves – as if we’d jumped off our roots, as if the floor had slipped from under everyone’s feet?”
https://josephhamrick.substack.com/p/dostoevskys-youths-dostoevskys-warning