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“IN A 1789 LETTER to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wondered whether "one generation of men has a right to bind another." He concluded that the earth belongs to the living, "and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it" since, by the law of nature, "one generation is to another as one independent nation to another." He went on to argue that "every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires" at the end of a generation. "If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not right."(6)

Jefferson's focus was narrow. At the time he wrote, he was worried about public debt. He feared the power of one generation to cripple future generations with a legacy of reckless spending. He did not repudiate the past, however. All the Founders, Jefferson included, worked with a keen respect for history and its lessons.

But ideas can have unforeseen results. More than two hundred years later, Jefferson's words seem prophetic in an unintended way. They perfectly capture the ruptures and discontinuity at the heart of our current culture. As a people, we Americans have steadily lost interest in the past, and we've steadily grown in our taste for self-invention. If the earth belongs to the living, then we-the living-can do with it as we please; which means our appetites are licensed to profoundly shape the future, against and in spite of the past.

Why is that important? The baby boomers of the 1960s-the happy agents of America's cultural revolution—had the benefit of rebelling against a society with a well-developed moral framework and coherent political memory, both of which they unconsciously borrowed from, even in revolt. They had children. Those children are now having children. And what those new young adults and teens think and do will make the next America.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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(6) Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison: The Earth Belongs to the Living,” Paris, September 6, 1789.

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Mood. 🌧 Instagram: kokokourtney

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“And what will that "next America" look like? Plenty of data exist on the habits of today's young people and emerging adults. Much of it is already well known. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues have done some of the best research. It's worth recalling parts of it here.

In 2011, speaking of Americans then aged eighteen to twenty-five, Smith wrote that, despite many good exceptions, large numbers of "emerging adults are oblivious to [spiritual truths, service to the wellbeing of others, and] other kinds of human goods ... focusing almost exclusively on materialistic consumption and financial security as the guiding stars of their lives." Addictions and intoxications of all sorts are "a central part of emerging adult culture." And contrary to media reports and popular assumptions (e.g., regarding environmental activism), "most emerging adults today ... have little care about, investment in or hope for the larger world around them."

As Smith notes, today's young adults are often "simply lost. They do not know the moral landscape of the real world that they inhabit. And they do not understand where they themselves stand in that real moral world." They've had withheld from them "something that every person deserves to have a chance to learn: how to think, speak, act well on matters of good and bad, right and wrong." And who did the withholding? For Smith and colleagues, "one way or another, adults and the adult world are almost always complicit in the troubles, suffering and misguided living of youth, if not the direct source of them."(7)

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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(7) Christian Smith, with Kari Christofferson, Hilary Davidson, and Patricia Snell Herzog, Lost in Translation: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9, 10, 11, 69, 147.

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cloudy mornings ☁️📖🍂

Instagram: kokokourtney

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“But the example of parents remains a key factor-often the key factor-in shaping young adult beliefs. The family is the main transmitter of religious conviction. Disrupting the family disrupts an entire cultural ecology. Former Catholics tend to come from homes where parents were tepid, less engaged, and indifferent or skeptical in matters of faith. Divorce and single-parent households have furthered the problem. As families break up, fail to form, or simply lose interest in religious practice, the mental and moral universe of emerging adults becomes alienated from America's past. And if the mind of the young breaks fundamentally with the past, so, too, does that of the nation.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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time for writing poetry and chai tea, paired with my mom’s German chocolate brownie and hot chocolate. 🕊☕️ instagram: kokokourtney

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Firstly, when you get this, you have to answer with 5 things you like about yourself, publicly. Then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (non-negotiable, positivity is cool)

Ooh thank you!

I’m proud of myself for finishing my Master’s in Philosophy

It was a slow process but I’m able to pray the rosary and the Divine Mercy chaplet every day in most days

Curating this blog has been fun. It’s a great way to evangelize for a shy person like myself

I’m happy to have been able to wash the dishes this morning

Finally able to ink my hurt/comfort My Happy Marriage fan art last night. Will post soon for those who watch it

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“As Mary Eberstadt has argued, "the underlying and underappreciated quantum leap toward irreligiosity in the 1960s" owed most of its force to the birth control pill. It "[changed] relations between the sexes —that is to say, within the natural family—as never before."(10)

Just as Darwin's theory of evolution shook popular assumptions about human origins and identity, the pill "severed the cultural connection between Christian ethics and American common sense," inspiring a private revolution. The resulting disarray "extended well beyond the narrow issue of birth control to encompass the entirety of sexual ethics. Over the course of a decade or so, a large swath of America decided that two millennia of Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality were simply out of date."(11)

And not just out of date. The pill's impact rippled out in political ways:

These changing attitudes led to the redefinition of the private sphere, in the courts and culture alike, and a widespread sense that issues like contraception, premarital cohabitation and divorce-and then, much more controversially abortion-were private matters where the government had no business interfering. The very idea of "morals legislation" became suspect, and Christian arguments about family law and public policy that might have been accepted even by secular audiences in the 1940s came to be regarded with suspicion as potential violations of the separation of Church and state.

At the same time, a more sweeping idea gained ground as well-the conceit that many of Christianity's stringent sexual prohibitions were not only unnecessary but perverse.(12)

It's tempting to shrug off this kind of worried analysis as yet another case of religious neurosis about the body, an exaggerated anxiety about sex. Many people do exactly that—it saves them the burden of thinking. But sex, as we'll see throughout these pages, is intimately linked to how we understand ourselves as human.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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(10) Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2013), 133.

(11) & (12) Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012).

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Brookings, Oregon [OC] [5304x7952] - Author: ari-do-nature on reddit

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I think no one should be allowed in the Vatican unless they declare Christ is Lord at the gates.

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“Calvinism is branded into our national character, even for unbelievers. And it's a mixed blessing. In the words of the Catholic political scholar Pierre Manent, early Calvinism made a "magnificent contribution ... to modern political freedom." Why? Because in the Calvinist worldview, human power "is liberated or encouraged, but no human being, religious or secular, is above the law."(13)

Yet there's another side to the story. As the (also Christian) political philosopher George Grant put it, in North America, "The control of the passions in [Calvinist Protestantism became more and more concentrated on the sexual ... while the passions of greed and mastery were emancipated from traditional Christian restraints."(14) Translation: The peculiar frenzy for sex and acquisitiveness in today's American culture has oddly religious roots. The libertine sex is a reaction against (perceived) excessive sexual codes of the past. The consumer acquisitiveness is a celebration of material appetite and possibilities.

The great irony of the sixties' sexual revolution is this: In breaking down "bourgeois" morality-the covenantal bonds and sacred restrictions of Christian sexuality-it made all sex, and all relationships, a matter of transaction, a matter of consumption and disposal, between radically distinct individuals. The boomers, it turns out, were better free market capitalists than they knew. And their children even more so.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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(13) Pierre Manent, Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Benedicte Delorme-Montini (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015), 171.

(14) George Grant, Technology and Empire, 22–23. (15) Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape, “www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape, May 12, 2015.

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Photography by Masaya “家族グラフィーの人” @88Masaya

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“The American founding was a creature of the eighteenth century and one of its great political achievements. But demography matters, and the United States is a nation built on and by immigrants. Any such country constantly renews and rethinks itself as its demography changes. This is a good and healthy thing, so long as a mechanism exists to ensure a basic continuity with the past, to blend the newly arrived immigrant into the nation's basic vision of who man is and the nature of a good society. This in turn presumes that the nation's vision has some positive meaning, some higher common purpose. "Every man for himself" is poor soil for a shared identity.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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thank you for tagging me (and for being my friend)

Last song: baby sleep music (I was trying to put a kid sleep at day care)

Last movie: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Last book: Pope Francis, Hope: The Autobiography

Last show: the ‘90s anime Outlaw Star

Sweet/savory/spicy: Savory

Relationship status: Single

Last thing I googled: I use Brave and I searched up the released date for Outlaw Star

Looking forward to: watching some J-dramas and the new anime The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity

Current obsession: YouTube shorts on cool things in Japan

tagged by @eyedanceonyggdrasil 🩷 Thank you for tagging me 🌸

last song: Fighting with Myself by LP

last movie: I watched He Is Out There (2018) on tv then I was in the same situation in my dream it was not nice.

last book: The Assassin's Apprentice ( still didn't finish it I'm sorry)

last tv show: The White Lotus, I am really loving it!! Tanya is such a delight to watch, I admit I was just there for season 3 but the second season is also interesting. Season one was meh, I was so sad for Armand, Shane should have been the one in that casket. I was also so sad for Kai... Poor boy. Never trust rich people.

sweet/savory/spicy: I enjoy all of them, I can't choose between!

relationship status: SINGLE!! stop reminding me this I'm so lonely :(

last thing I googled: English the Turkish translation for couple words

looking forward to: a friend is coming to visit me soon, I am looking forward to it. I don't want to disappoint them so I am a bit nervous.

current obsession: there is none at the moment and I need one immediately. I can't live without an obsession. I truly need something to keep me going. I am available to ideas.

tagging: @jester-to-the-king @baqsy @immigrant @not-easily-conquered @forestdeity @cultercultist @straynoahide

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“Many Latino immigrants become evangelicals. In a narrow sense, that's almost "good" news. The worse news is that many others drop away from any religious affiliation. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study showed that 43 percent of Latino evangelicals are former Catholics. "They come to a country where more than half the religious population changes religious affiliation at least once in their lifetime, and the majority of them change affiliation more than once," explained Luis Lugo, formerly with the Pew Research Center. "They come into a context where it is simply more acceptable to leave Catholicism for something else."(20)

Additionally-and ironically-Lugo noted that "Latino evangelicals are much more socially conservative than Latino Catholics ... So when these people convert from Catholicism to evangelicalism, they actually come closer to the official views of the Roman Catholic Church on social issues."(21)

Again, why does any of this matter? The facts about immigrant faith, its fluidity and its decline, are important for a reason. Unlike the past, the formative spirit in today's American life is cool to religion and no longer broadly biblical. Thus, the newly arrived are now shaped very differently from the past by their experiences in this country. And what immigrants believe and practice (or don't) today will influence what the nation as a whole believes and practices (or doesn't) tomorrow.”

-Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World

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(20) & (21) Joshua Bolding, “Diffusion of Faith: Immigrants Are Transforming American Christianity,” Deseret News, January 12, 2012.

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When I walked inside the St. Peter’s basilica, I realized that the most eloquent against atheism is beauty.

I think welcoming materialist atheists inside would at least put a dent in their secular ideology.

Remember that a mentally disturbed Hungarian-born Australian walked into the chapel and attacked the Pietà sculpture with his geologist’s hammer while shouting, "I am Jesus Christ; I have risen from the dead!"

I think no one should be allowed in the Vatican unless they declare Christ is Lord at the gates.