"Miracles of Stupidity"

The latest number of "Touchstone" actually arrived a couple of weeks or so ago.  But I only got into it the other day in my comfy chair while feeling sorry for myself and my cold or flu or whatever it was.  And still is, if it comes to that. At least a bit with the remains of the cough and the absence of energy still hanging on.

Where was I?

Oh, yes.  Touchstone.   Wonderful magazine.  You really should subscribe if you don't already.   This issue, the September/October 2024 number,  starts out with a bang, as it so often does, with a couple of paragraphs from S.M. Hutchens in the Quodlibet section.  Herewith:

“Radical inclusiveness,” like “reaching room temperature,” is a euphemism for death, and those who practice it doom themselves. An institution or organism is radically and actively exclusive, living by a rigid and infinitely complex rule of what it keeps in and out of itself to maintain integrity and health. It is a Miracle of Stupidity that leaders in the churches, who, above all people, should know better, seize upon and radicalize the concept of inclusiveness and make it a virtue in the reputed service of the Lord, who declared himself to be an instrument of radical division, the bringer of a sword, the separator of the saved and the damned. But such churchmen at least do the faithful the service of identifying themselves by their maxims as fools who are not to be followed.

“Miracles of Stupidity” into which people educate themselves are well worth identifying and enumerating—as, for example, “diversity-as-virtue,” a euphemism for the exclusion of the Other in the chaos of mass self-affirmation.

Wonderful way to start an issue.  And not one, but four pieces by Anthony Esolen should one continue to read further.  Tolle, lege, indeed.