If a church offers no truth that is not available in the general culture — in, for instance, the editorials of the New York Times or, for that matter, of National Review — there is not much reason to pay it attention.
— Richard John Neuhaus, born on this date in 1936
"if later I was taken to some Unitarian Church, it didn't matter. It seemed a little ridiculous, all those good people in their Sunday clothes, so demure, so conscious of one another, not needing in the least to pray or be prayed for, nor inclined to sing, but liking to flock together once a week, as people in Spain flock to the paseo, and glad to hear a sermon like the leading article in some superior newspaper, calculated to confirm the conviction already in them that their bourgeois virtues were quite sufficient and that perhaps in time poor backward races and nations might be led to acquire them."
ReplyDeleteGeorge Santayana, Persons and Places