"It can't happen here."
So says Doremus Jessup, liberal editor of a small-town Vermont newspaper, and his friends at the beginning of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel of the same title. What can’t happen in the United States is fascism and tyranny along the lines of Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin – even in a time of great economic difficulty. But…
In 1936, ‘Buzz’ Windrip, a populist senator from the US Midwest gets elected president of the United States on a radical ticket – tight control over capitalism, funds to help all citizens (almost a Basic Income Grant), national reconstruction, etc. Within a few months the US Congress has been silenced, the authority of the Supreme Court hobbled.
Lotto: the State as Croupier?
The Lotto is in trouble again apparently. It now stands accused of hoarding monies it should have disbursed to the charities it likes to remind its critics that it supports. But what is a lottery in reality?
John Ralston Saul labels lotteries ‘stealth taxes’.
Mindwalk
When two old friends, one an unsuccessful US presidential hopeful, and the other a poet and speechwriter, decide to meet at the historic site of Mont St Michel in Normandy to discuss the possibility of a second stab at the presidency, they are in for an unexpected ‘mindwalk’ thanks to a chance encounter with a feminist ex-scientist.
Mindwalk is the film version of Fritjof Kapra’s paradigm-shattering works Turning Point and The Tao of Physics, both penned over twenty years ago.
Book Review: Enough: breaking free from the world of excess, by John Naish
How to live the good life in an age of consumerism and excess? It struck me as hopeful that a book that asks the age-old philosophical question for our own time should be available at CNA.
British journalist John Naish's answer is what he calls 'enoughism'. He hopes that if enough people adopt it, we will avert an eco-catastrophe and find a modest personal contentment in the process.
Preaching in a Vacuum
Chris Chatteris argues for more feedback to preaching and preachers. See the article in the US Jesuit magazine, America at http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11679
Grand Inquisitors
In the classic novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879), Fyodor Dostoyevsky recounts the terrifying parable of the ‘Grand Inquisitor’. Christ returns, arriving in Spain, and is taken by the religious authorities before the head of the Inquisition where he is condemned for preaching a gospel of freedom, responsibility and conscience.
This is not, says the Grand Inquisitor, what the masses need. They cannot handle freedom. Give them bread, given them magic and miracles, give them discipline and order. By rejecting the temptations of Satan, Christ brought ordinary people unbearable duties. By accepting these temptations the Church has freed people from the burden Christ laid upon them. Christ is commanded to depart and not to return under pain of death…
Besotted with God
As a young Benedictine, Bede Griffiths once described how in love he was with his newly-found religious life. He wrote to a friend saying how he loved everything about the monastery, even down to its very bricks and stones.
