Sunrise.............................

     I had always loved sunrise:  was always renewed in spirit.  For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn.  The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.

-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses

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A canary in the coal mine...............?

"We now worship at the altar of innovation and youth, versus character or kindness."

-Scott Galloway,  The Algebra of Happiness:  Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

On religious toleration......................

     Madison, half Mason's age, improved his language, proposing a crucial change to the clause on religious liberty.  Mason's draft, reflecting a hundred years of liberal thought going back to John Locke, called for "the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion."  Yet this did not seem liberal enough for Madison.  Toleration implies those who tolerate: superiors who grant freedom to others.  But who can be trusted to pass such judgments, even if the judgment is to live and let live?  Judges may change their minds.  The Anglican establishment of Virginia, compared with established churches in other colonies, had been fairly tolerant—except when it hadn't, and then it made water in Baptists' faces.  So Madison prepared an amendment.  "All men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise" of religion.  No one could be said to allow men to worship as they wished:  they worshipped as they wished because it was their right as men.  Madison's language shifted the ground of religious liberty from a tolerant society or state, to human nature, and lifted the Declaration of Rights from an event in Virginia history to a landmark of world intellectual history.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison

A search for meaning........................

...........................An essay on worship and "isms":

An awareness of our dependence upon that which is larger breeds the humility without which wisdom is not possible. It reminds us that our ego is just a small part of us, and is dependent upon – and easily influenced by – irrational, unconscious forces that are beyond our full understanding. We must be humble before the destructive capacity that exists within each one of us, and like the Roman slave, we must remind ourselves occasionally, that we are merely ordinary.

-Lisa Marchiano

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