Though Benedict XVI traveled widely and tried to promote the growth of Catholicism outside the West, he was nevertheless in many ways a deeply Eurocentric figure, perhaps nowhere more so than in his conviction that radical secularism represents the gravest contemporary challenge to the faith.But for Catholics in other parts of the world, it sometimes seemed a peculiar fixation. Catholics in Nigeria facing the rise of the militant Boko Haram movement, for example, or Catholics in India struggling with Hindu radicalism, often had a hard time getting worked up over the abstract threat of secular thought. And in Latin America, watching Evangelicals and Pentecostals eat into traditional Catholic strongholds, many Catholics would be equally reluctant to flag the struggle against secularism as job number one.
Medieval Batman, via Adam Roberts on Twitter
Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Lang (upper right), & crew on the set of Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang) (via)
Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship. Like many of these trends, it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. (A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people’s private lives and inner worlds even when they don’t show up in the nation’s G.D.P.In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before. But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.
“Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, most thrilling conversation.”
— Richard Russo
Philip Jenkins: “As an intact book from this era, the Faddan More Psalter is an amazing enough find in its own right. Even so, its story became even stranger in 2010, when archaeologists reported finding eighth century Egyptian papyrus in its cover. One remarks that ‘The cover could have had several lives before it ended up basically as a folder for the manuscript in the bog. … It could have traveled from a library somewhere in Egypt to the Holy Land or to Constantinople or Rome and then to Ireland.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjl11bWVJhw?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
The Library: A Film
And grossly inaccurate. But, you know, never mind.