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“Against the reliability of common sense, the laws of science, the ravages of sin, the tendencies of mankind, and the metaphysics which govern created things, some things are not destroyed by time. The ability to last is so exceedingly rare, when a man finds something which has bested time, he has found something for which there is only fitting adjective: divine.”

“It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.”

“Despite such verve and passion for Truth, the Christian brand is now rightly denigrated everywhere as trite and trivial. To put the word “Christian” before any kind of service, institution, or work of art is to consign the thing in question to the garbage pile of cut-rate design and cheap sentimentality.”

“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”

“Jackson Pollock and Hugh Hefner both rose to prominence in the 1950s, though Pollock’s appeal was that no one understood him, and Hefner’s appeal was that no one misunderstood him. When Modern men think of art, they tend to think of such highs and lows. In the midst of this daring game of extremes, art lost the common touch.”

“Very beautiful things become harder to like the more we give ourselves over to the spectacular, sexy, shocking, ultra-sensual, fashionable art and ethics of Modernity. So far as acquiring good taste is concerned, balance is a myth. Every blockbuster film a man watches makes the task of reading Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre seem more dull and more pointless.”

“Mediocre art not only hinders our ability to understand other people, it demands that we interpret our own lives through a laughably narrow range of emotions largely defined and curated by the unmarried, agnostic, pro-choice twentysomethings who now rule our culture.”