Check out what The Maurin Academy founders and instructors are reading this month!
The Tyranny of the Banal: On the Renewal of Catholic Moral Theology by David Deane
“Totalitarianism — the forcing of people through the laws of a State to live in ways in opposition to their beliefs — may not be a deviation from the best principles of modern liberal democracy, it may, rather, proceed inexorably from the very logic on which such modern Western, secular liberal democracies are based. Rather than being an aberration … the epistemology that is hegemonic in the modern West drives an ethics that guarantees totalitarianism.”
Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss
“The precarious status of philosophy in Judaism as well as in Islam was not in every respect a misfortune for philosophy. The official recognition of philosophy in the Christian world made philosophy subject to ecclesiastical supervision. The precarious position of philosophy in the Islamic–Jewish world guaranteed its private character and therewith its inner freedom from supervision.”
Characters of the Reformation by Hilaire Belloc
Most people would still say, being asked what was Richelieu’s lifework, “The Consolidation of the French nation through the strengthening of the French monarchy.” That was certainly his intention… But the fruits of a man’s work are never those which he expects—there is always some side effect which will seem after a certain lapse of time to be the principal one. A man wins a battle in order to obtain a crown and the result—unexpected by himself—is a change of language over a wide district. A man protects some oppressed people and liberates them from their oppressor and the result—unexpected to himself and coming perhaps a hundred years later—is the conquest of his own people by those whom he had befriended. A man raises a rebellion to establish democracy, and the result is government by a financial oligarchy.”
Women and the Common Life by Christopher Lasch
“The modern home, which presupposes a radical separation of domestic life from the world of work, was an invention of the 19th century. The decline of household production and the rise of wage labor made it possible—made it necessary—to conceive of the family as a private retreat from a public world increasingly dominated by the impersonal mechanisms of the market.”
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
“..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You’re in this place. There’s other people all around you, but they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.”
Interesting list!