What The Soul of the World captures so beautifully is how conversion through a subject-subject encounter with God necessarily changes a person's worldview, and all the consequences of that transformation. It is to see that "being is a gift", not an accident. It is to understand ourselves as judged. It is to see other persons as uniquely individual, endowed with an inviolable dignity: "We cannot live in full personal communication with our kind if we treat all our relations as contractual. People are not for sale: to address the other as you rather than as he or she is automatically to see him or her as an individual for whom no substitutes exist."
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Coming home to the world …
… Encounter with the Sacred Realm | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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While I agree with the article, I have some reservations with the following paragraph. It assumes that same sex marriage arises from a contractual understanding of relationships:
ReplyDeleteA culture that has lost all sense of the sacred necessarily treats relations as contractual. For persons of faith, communicating with this culture on issues like abortion, assisted suicide or same-sex marriage, is difficult because it means entering a plea for an understanding of the sacred before it is possible to explain why treating relations as contractual, rather than as sacred avowed bonds, is antithetical to true human flourishing. With his quietly considered explanation of the sacred, Scruton puts the case for traditional marriage, for example, in a way that resists the hysteria surrounding most discourse on the topic.
I, too, had a problem with that. I can't see why a sense of the sacred must be exclusively heterosexual, since the terminus ad quem of the sacred is love, But sex is not the only thing or even the most important thing love connects to, while sex, as often as not, fails tot connect to love. The sacred is a good way, perhaps even the best way, for sex to gain access to love.
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