Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Lockwood O'Donovan on "the more problematic aspects of [our] political future"

"In the prevailing civil cult of European politics today, the final public good, which is the measure of all the others, is the self-determination of the subject (individual or collective), who, acting in an arena of increasingly open-ended choice, regards human and non-human nature as the mere stuff of technological manipulation."

     Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, "Subsidiarity and political authority in theological perspective," in Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Bonds of imperfection: Christian politics, past and present (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 244 (225-245).  The context in which this sits, and from the application of the historical analysis to the "evaluation in view of European integration" beginning on p. 239 especially, is rich.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

". . . it was his great good fortune/to live a madman, and die sane."

     Sansón Carrasco's epitaph for Don Quixote, in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote II.lxxiv (trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003), 939).