[Donald Trump] is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, “although endlessly brooding on power, victory defeat, revenge,” wrote Orwell, tends to be “uninterested in what happens in the real world.” Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism “has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.”
A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well – and wishing it would do better.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, pages 113-114.
Category: Excerpts
Excerpt #10
I simply do not want to be capable of acknowledging luck. I am not even sure I think it a good idea to talk about the fragility of our lives as if it were a general condition. The cross of Jesus is not a symbol of the fragility of a virtuous life, but the result of the expected conflict of God’s messiah with the powers. Because of that cross Christians are taught that they are not subject to fortune in a manner that makes them impotent. Rather, through the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they have been given the charge to rage against fortune – particularly when it takes the form of injustice that we are constantly tempted to call “fate.”
Stanley Hauerwas, “Can Aristotle Be a Liberal? Martha Nussbaum on Luck,” in Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy, page 93.
Excerpt #9
Fundamentalists and biblical critics alike fail to acknowledge the political character of their account of the Bible, and they fail to do so for very similar reasons. They want to disguise how their “interpretations” underwrite the privileges of the constituency that they serve. Admittedly, such realities may also be hidden from themselves, convinced as they are of the “objectivity” of their method. According, fundamentalism and biblical criticism are Enlightenment ideologies in the service of the fictive agent if the Enlightenment – namely, the rational individual – who believes that truth in general (and particularly) the truth of the Christian faith) can be known without initiation into a community that requires transformation of the self.
Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, page 35
Justin DaMetz 