An order of love and justice

"The dullard does not know, nor does the fool understand" (Ps 92)

…a way by which we keep ourselves in constant awareness of the divine order; an order of love and justice which embraces and underlies all order.” (John Macquarrie).

Many of you are aware of the conversation we had in the Order of the Ascension a few years ago about the need to cast a wider net in the sources we used to understand our world. Our starting place, of course, was to do the Daily Office. Then we talked about what we looked at and read frequently and routinely.

I read mainstream sources like the New York Times (since my junior year at Penn State) and the Associated Press (AP). Given my long relationship with them I have learned to see the bias each carries. So, I also look at other sources most days like The Dispatch, The Free Press and Politico National Security. From time to time, I’ll peak at the Guardian, The Times of Israel, The Harvard Crimson, Al Jazeera, and the Marine Corps Times. And I’ll skim Google News each week.

I’m retired. Sort of. I seem to have enough time and interest to read broadly. Some of that also rises out of the alternative vocations that might have been mine if I hadn’t been called to the priesthood. One was becoming an officer in the USMC.The other was becoming a high school social studies teacher. I went down each of those roads in my training.

Most people aren’t going to have the time or interest to give that much time to national and world affairs. But everyone faces the same dilemma — how can I be a responsible citizen in an age of so much ideological bias and disinformation.

Here are a few examples from today’s news that I didn’t find in the mainstream media. Each offered me a slightly different take on what was happening in our world.

This is from POLITICO's National Security Daily: “If you stick with the numbers, we will not get there, we will not be safe in 4 or 5 years,” NATO Secretary General MARK RUTTE told reporters on the sidelines of the conference today. “So we don't only have to do this because it is fair to the Americans who want us to do more, to take a bigger share of the burden, but also because we have to make sure that we can protect ourselves collectively.”

I look forward to Friday’s TGIF piece by Nellie Bowles. It’s all snark (sarcastic, impertinent, and irreverent). I know it must say something about some problem in my childhood to be attracted to such material. “U.S. pays for all sides of the war: Now that USAID has been laid bare by the boys of DOGE, more strange facts about its spending are coming to light. In Gaza, USAID seems to have been basically a group committed to fighting against Israel, so we were essentially funding both sides of the war. Exciting! USAID sent money to organizations whose leaders promoted or were tied to various terrorist groups. Like: Six days before October 7, USAID awarded $900,000 to a Gaza charity that the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was involved with. USAID also funded a Gazan “educational and community center” controlled by an association whose leader once said that Jerusalem needed to be cleansed “from the impurity of the Jews.” (This is all from a great Free Beacon story.) These sound like little numbers, but it adds up. In the aftermath of the war, USAID provided more than $2 billion for aid in Gaza, which was and is completely controlled by Hamas (the war’s gone great, why do you ask?).”

Then Nellie goes after RFK: “I’m actively worried about RFK’s credit card debt: Financial disclosure forms that I missed two weeks ago showed that RFK Jr. is carrying up to $1.2 million in credit card debt. I cannot imagine how he’s going to consume all that grass-fed protein and, I assume, colloidal silver. I also love that in this CNBC article, they say that “Financial experts interviewed by CNBC said balances that high are unusual.” Well yeah, I hope so. I really do. This is the first time I’ve genuinely questioned RFK’s wisdom. Like, coming out against vaccines and being paranoid about tap water? That’s called being a California mom. But being a handsome, smart Kennedy and having credit card debt reflects a disorganized side of the man that I don’t love. It reflects an internal male chaos that alarms me. It smells of second families and messy cars.”

I even read the comments in the New York Times and The Free Press. The NYT is mostly people on the left going out of their minds about the outrage of the day from the White House. The Free Press is mostly people on the right angry when TFP isn’t being conservative or populist enough. I can usually learn about a new conspiracy theory doing this. Sometimes Nellie gets a pass because so many people find her funny.

The Times of Israel had something I didn’t see anyplace else: “The diplomatic adviser to UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed calls on Hamas to step down from power in Gaza, as the Arab push against the terror group begins to intensify.Earlier this week, Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Hamas “should relinquish power if serving Palestinian interests demands it.”

Sister Michelle got me onto The Morning Dispatch as a quick and rather “just the facts” way to get the news with a minimum of ideological bias. They seem to do a reasonable job of sorting the news from opinion. Today kicked off with this, “Happy Friday! A humpback whale briefly swallowed a 24-year-old kayaker off the coast of Chile on Saturday before spitting him out unharmed. In a video of the incident, the man’s father can be heard telling him to stay calm, while trying to direct him back to his overturned boat post-spit-out. We’re not sure we’d have the same mental clarity after witnessing a miracle of biblical proportions.” That caught my attention because Jonah is my barista at Uptown Expresso.

This abides,

Brother Robert, OA

Feast of Cyril & Methodius, Missionaries to the Slavs, 869, 885