#ideals

"The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable."

"'Now,' the judge said. 'We can go back to the administration of justice.' 'Is that real justice or the idea of justice?'"

If we want to understand the true nature of any community, then we should observe what its members love. What do they pursue? What do they treasure? What commands their ultimate allegiance? The church is unique in the world. It is the only community on earth bound together by the Triune God’s prior love and the love we return to him in response. Christ is therefore our highest love and ultimate authority. He is the heart of our political identity.

America at 250: A declaration of ideals reset the world – and still resonates today

It seems sometimes very strange to me, that image of a child so wholly bent on a vocation. So ambitious. The nature of that ambition, of literary ambition, seems to me a subject too large for this occasion. Like most people hungry for praise and ashamed of that, of any hunger, I alternated between contempt for the world that judged me and lacerating self-hatred. To my mind, to be wrong in the smallest particular was to be wrong utterly. On the surface, I was poised, cool, indifferent, given to laconic exhibitions of disdain. A description, I suppose, of any adolescence.

The evolution of Lincoln’s immigration ideals: A historian assesses his legacy