Friday 11 July 2014

Just war criteria applied to today's 'culture wars'

There are some instructive comments in an article by John Goerke in The Imaginative Conservative which we can all take on board to our benefit and without yielding an inch in the necessary defence of  revealed truth in this relativistic age:
"...To put it another way: if our home camp is nothing but a place of cultivated disease, it will soon cease to be a home camp worth fighting for. These weekly mailings needn’t be so over-the-top, nor so hard on the eyes. Our journalism need not strain itself to reach the apex of moral outrage. Children speak of small things in big and loud ways. Poets speak of big things in small and quiet ways. It is my humble suggestion that we take the latter as our example. Let us stop attempting to bother each other into a frenzy of political outrage. Let us instead stand atop our wagons and recite “St. Crispin’s Day” for all to hear. This may be antiquated and idealistic, but it is for love of the old world and of impossible aspirations that I became a conservative in the first place. 
The culture wars are not going away. This is perhaps “the end of the beginning.” Yet, I hope this may be the beginning of the end for the sort of communication I have criticized here. I am a young conservative. Myself and my fellows in the Millennial camp found our political identity in the works of G.K. Chesterton, Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot and Roger Scruton. Theirs was a conservatism of beauty, of passion, of (dare I be cliché) love. I humbly suggest that the conservative principle of the culture wars ought to be this: that we engage our opponents as if they were lovable, despite all evidence to the contrary. For we must bear in mind the principle of Christianity and of the Cross: that we are lovable, despite all evidence to the contrary.... "
Read it all here 




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