The museum courts sight—consumption, a gaze that passes through and never stays. The church courts attention: relegere, a re-gathering that gathers the light in and releases it back into its own nature—non-consumption, community. This capacity to relate to itself, not to an external purpose, permits rest and contemplation. Deprived of it, we suffocate on our own shallow, consumptive attention. Capitalism dislikes silence.
Tag: community
- Theme: Growth
Virtue Is Exhausting, and Worth It
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1–2 minutesDo the right thing even when you don’t want to — the people who matter will notice, trust you, and your life will ease as a result.
In the short term, you’ll take on more responsibility: discipline is exhausting and Sisyphean. But it earns you people to lean on in the long term.
Skip the early difficulty, and you trade it for a future of hardship without trust or companionship.
- Theme: Self
Protect What You Love
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1–2 minutesDo you look around and find what you love — and try to protect it?
The world is lovable, and so are people. Traditions hold the community together, trust maintains the community, and friends stabilize us.
Profoundly, preservation (conservatism) is more respectful than progress. Ego and idealism drive change, challenge what works, and thrive on manufactured instability.
Roger Scruton’s quiet challenge: before you break anything, know what you’re willing to defend.
- Theme: Self
Consumption’s Empty Cradle
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1–2 minutesModern life’s sprawling, de-sited communities dissolve rooted belonging.
Without a place—or people—to hold our woes, offer forgiveness, and restore us through communion, we lose spiritual closure and contentment.
Bereft of that human anchor, we turn to objects: things imbued with aura, narrative, and promise.
Consumption becomes self-medication, a frantic substitute for the balance once found in shared spirit. We buy to fill the void that only belonging can heal. - Theme: Self
The Quiet Cure
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1–2 minutesIn our age of endless discourse, conflict often deepens through expression. Communication, once a bridge to communion, now divides—amplifying identity, distinction, and abstract allegiance.
But what if silence, not speech, held the healing power? In silence, ego recedes; shared presence overrides individual assertion.
This is not surrender but sublimation—the self dissolving momentarily into collective stillness.
Pre-modern care thrived on implicit belonging, not perpetual debate. Ideas need not dominate to matter. Perhaps true communion arises not in saying more, but in being more together, quietly.
- Theme: Self
Liability: Trust Through Complicity
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1–2 minutesIn a litigious society, the risk is never worth the reward. Safety is about protecting against liability more than ensuring individual well-being. The cost is a loss of shared experiences that initiate new people into trust. (To remain safe, isolation and restriction are paramount.)
Instead, the rules (now made plain and authoritarian) can be subverted to extended mutual risk, fostering complicity and connection. The polite decline of legalese introduces gray zones, navigated quietly under bureaucratic oversight, reintroducing the shared transgression as complicit bonding.
- Theme: Growth
The Rituals of Absence: From Community to Communion
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1–2 minutesCommunity unites around presence—a shared purpose or goal.
Communion, as Peter Rollins suggests, unites around absence—a shared void, grief, or loss. It is not built by consensus, but by mutual vulnerability, often acknowledged through ritual.
Byung-Chul Han notes our ritual erosion: we’ve streamlined away liturgies that once made communion possible. In chasing efficiency, we lost the slow architectures of mourning and meaning. Without ritual, absence isolates rather than bonds.
What remains is a restless longing—not for connection through achievement, but through shared helplessness.
We lack not only meaning, but the means to lack meaning together: a void we attempt to fill with shallow pursuits.
- Theme: Self
Regulation and Sociality
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1–2 minutesGovernmental regulation against corporations is, in theory, to protect citizens and societal values against the predations of greed and avarice that would cannibalize (consume) the very framework of trust and integrity upon which those economic markets are built.
The question becomes, does introducing new regulations reinstitute social values? Can you roll back into societal trust by muzzling sociopathic corporate appetites?
You see the conundrum: coercive limitation (force and power) allows for fairness, which provides the trust to participate with others. Or, networks of trust evolve, opening the opportunity for predatory behavior, which must be regulated with disciplinary measures. Either way, decency and fairness are fragile necessities for sociality, either manufactured by force or protected by coercive power, yet concomitant forces.
- Theme: Self
“she’s not to be trusted”
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1–2 minutesOverheard: "Her emotions get the best of her; she’s not to be trusted." This applies to all of us at times.
Yet, unraveling the implications means considering emotions fickle, not the best version of a person but instead the very thing that leads them astray: the "best of her" is a stable and dependable friend whom we can predict. (This is a worthwhile prediction, not the ole "she is predictable in her consistent unpredictability.")
We need not neuter our emotional selves; however, regulating our actions is key to forming trust. It is counterintuitive, perhaps cruel, to say, "feel how you want, but don’t act how you feel." This temperance of feeling feels repressive, yet the reward is comfort in a community, another emotional feeling of stability, solidarity, and safety.
- Theme: Self
The romantic vs. the pragmatist
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1–2 minutesTo be a romantic is to be unable to live with a distinction, a separation. The romantic urge is a unification of all things: emotions, hopes, and dreams are also reality, just as the transcendent abstractions are also ontologically immanent.
According to the grown-ups, this is juvenile. Those hard-minded, soulless pragmatists cut themselves off from sublime wonders, creating a bedrock of stability upon which they are but one more rock.
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