[Jamie] Tillman told me that she thought she had no choice but to plead guilty — it was unlikely, she believed, that the judge would take her word over that of the arresting officers. “I admit, your honor,” she said. “I just want to get me out of here as soon as possible.” Under Mississippi state law, public intoxication is punishable by a $100 fine or up to 30 days in jail. Ross opted for the maximum fine. Tillman began to cry.

The Federal Reserve Board has estimated that 40 percent of Americans don’t have enough money in their bank accounts to cover an emergency expense of $400. Tillman didn’t even have $10. She couldn’t call her family for help. She was estranged from her father and from her mother, who had custody of Tillman’s two young daughters from a previous relationship.

“I can’t — ” Tillman stammered to Ross. “I can’t — ”

Ross explained the system in his court: For every day a defendant stayed in the Alcorn County jail, $25 was knocked off his or her fine. Tillman had been locked up for five days as she awaited her hearing, meaning she had accumulated a credit of $125 toward the overall fine of $255. (The extra $155 was a processing fee.) Her balance on the fine was now $130. Was Tillman able to produce that or call someone who could?

“I can’t,” Tillman responded, so softly that the court recorder entered her response as “inaudible.” She tried to summon something more coherent, but it was too late: The bailiff was tugging at her sleeve. She would be returned to the jail until Oct. 14, she was informed, at which point Ross would consider the fine paid and the matter settled.

That night, Tillman says, she conducted an informal poll of the 20 or so women in her pod at the Alcorn County jail. A majority, she says, were incarcerated for the same reason she was: an inability to pay a fine. Some had been languishing in jail for weeks. The inmates even had a phrase for it: “sitting it out.” Tillman’s face crumpled. “I thought, Because we’re poor, because we’re of a lower class, we aren’t allowed real freedom,” she recalled. “And it was the worst feeling in the world.”

Read it all.

In Sunday’s @NYTmag, I’ve got a long feature about the criminalization of poverty in the US, and the fines and fees that help trap poor Americans in unbreakable cycles of debt. This is a big problem already; unfortunately, it’s likely going to get bigger: https://t.co/VgU5lIXI61

— Matthew Shaer (@matthewshaer) January 8, 2019

All heresies are, essentially, an imbalance – the heightening of one aspect of truth over all others.

It seems to me that the fundamental error of any “Prosperity Gospel” lies in the elevation of the truth that yes, we find authentic peace and true joy when our wills and choices are aligned with God’s will. That’s the truth we find in the very beginning of Scripture: Adam and Eve at peace in the Garden, and then at war with each other, God, nature and themselves outside of it.

The way that a “Prosperity Gospel” twists this truth is when it encourages us to uncritically identify the fruits of a right relationship with God with anything temporal.

It instrumentalizes the spiritual life.

So now, look beyond the easy targets of health-and-wealth. Survey the contemporary popular spiritual landscape, Catholic and otherwise. If there’s a current self-help trend out there, are spiritual gurus close behind, baptizing it?

Read it all.

None of [Alan] Jacobs’s Christian humanists would have endorsed Nietzsche’s skepticism about the human or Barth’s distinctively modern theology, least of all Maritain, who would go on to pursue his same project but under the banner of universal human rights. But it is in these moments of intellectual humility and the frank acknowledgment of human finitude, which Jacobs delicately surfaces only ultimately to highlight, that we might find something that the what-is-human? discourse so often lacks: irony. I do not mean in the cultivated-nonchalant manner of certain pragmatists (think Richard Rorty shrugging his shoulders if that helps) or the cynicism of my childhood anti-hero Bart Simpson, but rather in the sense of an acute awareness of how parochial we humans always are. This ironic parochialism, as Charles Mathewes suggests, constrains both what we can know and what we can do; it reminds us of how situationally and historically contingent our forms of knowledge and life activity are, and how they are formed by the time and place allotted to us. Practiced well, such an irony can become a virtue of epistemic and ethical humility that need not necessarily lessen the desire to know or the hopeful expectation of its ultimate fulfillment. Such a parochialism cannot sustain an extension of sympathy to a boundless, universal human being, but it can focus our attention on the world in which we find ourselves. It can encourage a sustained attention to cracks in the universal sheen of sameness and help sustain practices that manage and constrain the compulsion to lose oneself in a void of universal what is humanness.

It can also help us come to terms with what seems to be our lot, namely, that integrity, fullness, or wholeness of human being is neither something to be recovered (a self, a community, a knowledge), nor is it something (a self, a community, a knowledge) to be defended against whatever might threaten it at any given time and place. Such a recovery and renewal––complete, universal, lasting––is not for a world that sits, since the fall and until its redemption, wholly within the saeculum. Our common world is riven by sinful deeds, disordered loves, and the hubris that full knowledge is rightfully ours here and now. And we, Christian or not, have no exclusive claim upon it.

By focusing on a shared world situated squarely in the saeculum, I am not suggesting that those who confess and hope in Christ cannot lead lives different from those who do not, that they ought not cultivate practices that better order their loves and nurture their faith and hope. I am simply arguing that pride may well be the most persistent of vices, a habit that lulls humans into assuming the sufficiency and truth of their own goodness and knowledge. The human, wrote Blaise Pascal, “is nothing but a subject full of error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him.” If we abide the wartime imperative of Jacobs’s Christian humanists to recover what is essentially human, we risk overlooking what knowledge we do have––our all-too-human capacity to mistake proximate for ultimate goods, to mistake our own goodness and knowledge for God’s fullness.

Read it all.

.@cwellmon reviewing Alan Jacobs? Yes, please. https://t.co/OHR0Ku0gTR cc. @commentmag

— (((Brian Dijkema))) (@BrianDijkema) January 10, 2019

10. What statement about friendship can be more sublime, more true, more valuable than this: it has been proved that friendship must begin in Christ, continue with Christ, and be perfected by
Christ. Come, now: propose what in your opinion should be the first question about friendship.

IVO. I think we should first discuss what friendship is, lest we appear to be painting on a void, not knowing what should guide and organize our talk.

11. AELRED. Is Cicero’s definition not an adequate beginningfor you? “Friendship is agreement in things human and divine, with good will and charity.”

12. IVO. If his definition suffices for you, it’s good enough for me.

–Aelred of Rievaulx Spiritual Friendship I.10-12 (Lawrence C. Braceland, tr., Marsha L. Dutton ed., Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010), p.57

12 Jan 1167: d. Aelred of Rievaulx – Cistercian Abbot, writer, biographer, historian #otd pic.twitter.com/5x4PnnBsn7

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) January 12, 2019

Almighty God, who didst endow thy abbot Aelred with the gift of Christian friendship and the wisdom to lead others in the way of holiness: Grant to thy people that same spirit of mutual affection, that, in loving one another, we may know the love of Christ and rejoice in the gift of thy eternal goodness; through the same Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Feast of #Saint Aelred (” 1167), abbot of Rievaulx, hagiographer, historian, & teacher of spiritual friendship pic.twitter.com/yujUolIvji

— Silverstream Priory (@cenacleosb) January 12, 2016

Almighty God, who hast manifested thy Son Jesus Christ to be a light to mankind: Grant that we thy people, being nourished by thy word and sacraments, may be strengthened to show forth to all men the unsearchable riches of Christ, so that he may be known, adored and obeyed, to the ends of the earth; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.

#Today is the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek epiphainen, a verb that means “to shine upon,” “to manifest,” or “to make known.” The feast of the Epiphany celebrates the many ways that Christ has made Himself known to the world. #EWTN #Catholic pic.twitter.com/Ab7CD8Nipv

— EWTN (@EWTN) January 6, 2019

Thus says the Lord:
“Heaven is my throne
and the earth is my footstool;
what is the house which you would build for me,
and what is the place of my rest?
All these things my hand has made,
and so all these things are mine,
says the Lord.
But this is the man to whom I will look,
he that is humble and contrite in spirit,
and trembles at my word….
“For as the new heavens and the new earth
which I will make
shall remain before me, says the Lord;
so shall your descendants and your name remain.
From new moon to new moon,
and from sabbath to sabbath,
all flesh shall come to worship before me,
says the Lord.

–Isaiah 66:1-2, 22-23