Category Archives: Culture

Review of Daniel A. Connor’s “The Relation Between Religion and Culture”

Introduction

The subtitle of the book named above is “A Synthesis of the Writings of Christopher Dawson”.

This is the introduction to my notes on this book, and therefore on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson.

I’m particularly interested in the connections that exist between of the idea of progress and Christianity.

Christopher Dawson (12 October 1889 – 25 May 1970 [I’ve just realised that I’m posting this on his 132nd birthday – I honestly did not plan this!] ) is a now largely forgotten scholar, who was once called “the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century”. Here’s one of his quotes:

“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.”

That is, IMHO, the 20th century described in a nutshell. And the first two decades of the 21st too. And the third, so far.  

The tragedy of our time is that the notion of “ends justifying means” is thoroughly anti-Christian, yet the Christian churches have been incapable, in the past century or two, of standing up against it, let alone turning its rising tide. If they even tried. One big exception in the 20th century was Pope John Paul II, whose very presence in the Vatican, let alone his words, inspired the Catholics in his mother country Poland to rise up, peacefully, against their communist oppressors. This was the beginning of the end of the most atheistic empire there has ever been. And it died with hardly a gunshot fired, hardly a loss of life (except a few in Rumania and the Baltic states).  

Anyway, back to Christopher Dawson. He wrote a large number of books, some of which I have recently read. To make my life a bit easier, I also read a book which claims to be “A Synthesis of the Writings of Christopher Dawson”, the title being “The Relation Between Religion and Culture” (TRBRAC), by Daniel A. Connor, first published in 1952. The next few posts are my notes and thoughts on the parts of that book I found interesting. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. I precede my own thoughts with the acronym “PwG”.)

Content of the review (so far):

  1. On the beginnings of “Europe”
  2. On religion and medieval science
  3. On the Renaissance
  4. On Lutheranism and Calvinism
  5. On the Enlightenment as a “Religion of Progress”
  6. On the industrial revolution
  7. On natural science
  8. On the return to Christian unity and the predicament Christianity is in now
  9. On Christianity and International Order
  10. From the conclusion of “The Relation Between Religion and Culture”

How to confront cancel culture

Comedian Dave Chappelle shows us

Brendan O’Neill has written a piece about Dave Chappelle. The comedian has recognised something important: The cancel-culture-crowd, which he opposes, want to make the world a better place. They are however going about it the wrong way:

And yet the truthfulness, the compulsion, of Chappelle’s utterance of thoughts and beliefs and jokes that have madly been turned into speechcrimes is unquestionably inspiring. Chappelle, in being Chappelle, shows us how to confront cancel culture. Not by acquiescing to it, of course. That always feeds the beast. The cancelling mob gets fat on apologies. Every public figure’s pleading for forgiveness is blood in the nostrils of the new censors. And not by opposing it just because that’s what your side in the culture war does. Indeed, in his recent podcast chat with Joe Rogan – even rubbing shoulders with Rogan confirms that Chappelle gives very few shits about the cordon sanitaire self-righteous cancellers have erected around certain people and ideas – Chappelle said he understands ‘the ideas behind some of these cancellations’. Cancellers kind of want to make the world a better place, he and Rogan agreed. The problem is that in the process of smashing that which offends them, they undermine the creative process necessary for an art like comedy and deny us the right to hear alternative ideas. Chappelle’s mix of sympathy for and opposition to the cancelling instinct makes him as far from a shit-stirring, ‘feminism is cancer’ grifter as it is possible to get.

In other words, the cancellers want progress, but in actual fact they are creating regress. They are destroying without creating. The way to oppose them is not to mirror their destructive attitude, but to create something better.

By being creative, we are emulating the creativity of God, who is the ultimate Creator. That is what we should be striving for, as our acts of creation allow us to progressively exercise dominion over the earth, as commanded by Him.