Mark Mitchell,
The Culture of Hospitality
It's a good strategy for traditional localists and Christians as well. Moreover, Christians should rely less on organizations, professional charity-givers and more on "informal" communal bonds.
Might the movie about St. Augustine,
Restless Heart, be helpful in helping us get some perspective about how to live as Christians in community? Might Blessed
Frederic Ozanam be a model for layman, even though he was living in a nation-state in its heyday? Saints can resist the dehumanizing tendencies of expanding political units through love and the protection of community, but they must realize in some fashion what they are up against. It is not sufficient to accept the way things are and live like everyone else because it is "normal."
Louis Bouyer's dichotomy between the church of the faithful and the church of numbers is not a pastoral problem arising from the tortuous history of Church-State relations per se, but because of the nature of the polities and political power when coupled to the inclination to sin? What check can there be on the desire for power than for other men to be organized and to protect their communities? Should the Church be trying to keep up with the state, engaging it on its level through "power politics" or the ballot, instead of pushing it towards a more humane scale by fostering local communities, which can be the bases of evangelization that they should be? If any "institution" is capable of protecting communities, the small, humane group, it is the Church. Rather than accepting the "inevitable" expansion of polities on the terms set by those in power, the Church should have zealously guarded the rights of local communities. (Too often bishops were content to go along with consolidation and the imposition of one culture as being superior?) Subvert the state through love. Legal protections will not be enough, if the laity do not care about protecting the Church.
Has the treatment of hunter-gatherer groups by the "civilized" world been rather inhumane, for the most part, even by Christian missionaries? We do not need to become anarcho-primitivists to recognize that men have a better life in smaller groups, though there may be some arguments about how big an ideal city should be.
Looking through a recent issue of
Valley Catholic, I see that most of the lay leaders getting recognition are women. What feminism in the Church?
How about the argument that since the Incarnation it is no longer possible... I can't remember the rest of the argument.
To have separate nations since all are one in Christ? Some cannot see how diversity can be reconciled with universality and oneness proper to the Body of Christ. They can only envision uniformity and a single culture and government.
Related:
Christian Democratic Party (
FB)
Christian Democracy and America's Future
Being Civil in Mean Times by Robert Woods