Augustine observes that humans are constituted in large part by their sociality. As he puts it in the City of God, “For there is nothing so social by nature as this race, no matter how discordant it has become through its fault.”

Read more on Happy Smothers, I Mean, Mother’s Day…

“Help me help you.”

Yesterday in conjunction with this week’s Acton Commentary I looked at Tim Riggins’ gift of freedom to his brother and the corresponding sense of responsibility that resulted. When Tim takes the rap for Billy, Billy has a responsibility to make something of his life. As Tim puts it, that’s the “deal.”

Read more on Augustine on ‘Spiteful Benevolence’…

Article: “Catholicism, Human Rights and the Public Sphere”
Christopher McCrudden, International Journal of Public Theology

This article suggests that the scope and meaning of human rights, and its relationship to religion, is anything but settled, and that this gives an opportunity to those who support a role for religion in public life to intervene. Such intervention should address four main issues. First, it should ensure that judges engage in attempting to understand religious issues from a cognitively internal viewpoint. Secondly, it should articulat a justification for freedom of religion that fully captures the core of the significance of religious belief, and the importance of the religious principles in the public sphere. Thirdly, it should ensure engagement and dialogue between the churches and others on the meaning of human dignity, given its centrality to religious and secular perspectives on rights. Lastly, the churches should consider more carefully what it means to give ‘public reasons’ in the political and cultural context, and how it can engage in the process of ‘public reasoning’ regarding human rights.

Article: “New Challenges for Catholic-Inspired NGOs in Light of Caritas in Veritate“
Jane Adolphe, Catholic Social Science Review

Read more on ResearchLinks – 08.17.12…

It is a commonplace in discussions of environmental economics to consider so-called “negative externalities,” a technical term for the bad or damaging consequences of an activity that affects those outside the realm of economic decision-making.

Read more on Trees, Evil, and Negative Externalities…

There’s a pretty entertaining piece on Salon.com by Christopher Noxon, “Is my kid a jerk, or is he just 2?”

There’s mild language, but the gist of the piece revolves around this observation:

Read more on Salon.com and Augustine on Kids…

As a brief follow-up to this week’s installment of Radio Free Acton, here are some of the direct quotes from Augustine on happiness.

First, he says,

A joy there is that is not granted to the godless, but to those only who worship you without looking for reward, because you yourself are their joy. This is the happy life and this alone: to rejoice in you, about you and because of you. This is the life of happiness, and it is not to be found anywhere else. Whoever thinks there can be some other is chasing a joy that is not the true one; yet such a person’s will has not turned away from all notion of joy.

This passage has some relevance to a recent Acton Commentary I wrote on tithing. The reason that a godless person’s will “has not turned away from all notion of joy” is because it is an ineradicable purpose of human nature to seek fulfillment and happiness (joy) in God, whether or not a person is conscious that it is actually God that is being sought. So when the “godless” seek joy in the created things of the world, they are actually seeking him in a corrupted and perverse way. It is a futile search for fulfillment apart from God, for “What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun?”

Read more on Augustine on God and Happiness…

In the prefatory address to King Francis in Calvin’s 1535 edition of the Institutes, Calvin cites Hilary of Poitiers approvingly:

Indeed, Hilary considered it a great vice in his day that, being occupied with foolish reverence for the episcopal dignity, men did not realize what a deadly hydra lurked under such a mask. For he speaks in this way: “One thing I admonish you, beware of Antichrist. It is wrong that a love of walls has seized you; wrong that you venerate the church of God in roofs and buildings; wrong that beneath these you introduce the name of peace. Is there any doubt that Antichrist will have his seat in them? To my mind, mountains, woods, lakes, prisons, and chasms are safer. For, either abiding in or cast into them, the prophets prophesied.”

Augustine too had railed against the emphasis on station and authority rather than service, as he writes that “a bishop who takes delight in ruling rather than in doing good is no true bishop” (City of God, 19.19).

Read more on The ‘Emergent’ Calvin…

This piece from the Scientific American examines the difficulty that human beings have achieving happiness even in a world characterized by material prosperity.

“Once average annual income is above $20,000 a head, higher pay brings no greater happiness,” writes Michael Shermer, in the context of Richard Lay૚rd’s observation that “we are no happier even though average incomes have more than doubled since 1950.”

Read more on The Happiness Conundrum…

One of the latest iterations of the reality TV craze is the show, “Bad Girls Club,” on the Oxygen network. The premise of the show revolves around a group of young women of diverse backgrounds brought together to live in one house: “What happens when you put seven ‘bad’ girls in a house together – the type of girls who lie, cheat and flirt their way out of trouble and have serious trust issues with other women?”

Read more on Ripsi’s Confession…

Speaking of the ubiquity of pornography in our culture, last week ABC News’ Nightline highlighted the work of XXXChurch, a ministry aimed at evangelizing porn stars and pornographers, as well as addressing the spiritual problems associated with consuming pornography. Check out the story, “The Porn Pastors: XXXChurch.com.”

Read more on Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin…