{"id":11544,"date":"2015-06-15T15:43:11","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T19:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=11544"},"modified":"2015-06-15T15:50:14","modified_gmt":"2015-06-15T19:50:14","slug":"receiving-fraternal-correction-from-non-catholics-saints-bookclub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2015\/06\/receiving-fraternal-correction-from-non-catholics-saints-bookclub.html","title":{"rendered":"Receiving Fraternal Correction from Non-Catholics [Saints Bookclub]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In 2015, I\u2019m reading and blogging through\u00a0Ronald Knox\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0collection of sermons on Christian exemplars,\u00a0<\/em>Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes<\/a>. \u00a0Every Monday (kinda), I\u2019ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to peruse them all and\/or read along.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"(Nic<\/a>
(Nic McPhee \/ Flickr<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In this week\u2019s chapter of Captive Flames<\/i>, Roland Knox discusses the stories of King David and St Edmund of Abingdon<\/a> in parallel, as a lens on how Catholics should live as exiles in the world and how they should root themselves. \u00a0It\u2019s certainly a topic I\u2019m interested in! \u00a0But I disagreed strongly with Knox\u2019s characterization of the spirit in which this Benedict Option-like life should be lived. \u00a0Knox wrote:<\/p>\n

It is possible nowadays, thank God, for laymen to take a direct and public part in spreading the faith. \u00a0But, even apart from that, we Catholics do not live as our grandfathers used to live, in a sort of water-tight compartment, separated from the world around us. \u00a0We mix freely with Protestant neighbours, and either we shall influence them or they us. \u00a0If we are not strongly fortified in the practice of religion, their unbelief will tell upon our faith, their low standard of morality will infect and degrade our consciences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe this is part of the problem of generalizing from saints to regular folks. \u00a0It\u2019s ridiculous for me to assume that other people will degrade\u00a0my<\/em> conscience rather than me degrading theirs, simply because I\u2019m a\u00a0member<\/em> of the church I think it most likely to be true. \u00a0That\u2019s a claim about the superiority of the Church, not about me.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0frequently<\/em> receive productive correction or moral examples from non-Catholics simply because you don\u2019t have to be right about\u00a0everything\u00a0<\/em>to notice when someone else is being wrong about some particular thing. \u00a0Our blind spots with regard to our own behavior are large enough that pretty much everyone who reads through the Evil Overlord List<\/a> and reads this piece of advice (\u201cOne of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.\u201d) winds up chuckling ruefully, thinking of past errors.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s reason to welcome the moral claims other make about me \u2014 I don\u2019t accept them uncritically, but I try to at least get curious. \u00a0I find it often helps to treat moral correction and questions the way Orson Scott Card suggests a writer should handle beta reader feedback in his\u00a0How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy<\/em>.<\/a>\u00a0 I don\u2019t have the quote at hand, but he says that readers are pretty much always right when they say part of a story doesn\u2019t work for them, and rarely right when they tell the author how to fix it. \u00a0(I think I\u2019ve seen other authors give this advice, too).<\/p>\n

Everyone has a conscience, naturally (though imperfectly) directing our attention to the good, so when my actions make someone else pause, confused or hurt, that\u2019s pretty valuable data. \u00a0Sometimes I\u2019m still right, and this is a moral error that the other person is making, sometimes we have different beliefs about the physical world but we\u2019d agree ethically if we resolved them and we should both try to figure out what\u2019s going on, sometimes I\u2019m doing the right thing, but I\u2019m not conveying some important piece of context and, absent that, other people are right to oppose me, and sometimes I\u2019m just plain wrong!<\/p>\n

In\u00a0last<\/em> week\u2019s chapter, Knox implied that just-plain-heretics can still be good beta readers of a Catholic\u2019s choices<\/a>, since sometimes sects try to strike out on their own because they think the Catholic church isn\u2019t living up to Catholic ideals. \u00a0That\u2019s the right-about-the-problem, wrong-about-the-solution kind of help that beta readers tend to provide.<\/p>\n

So, ultimately, I found Knox\u2019s chapter frustrating this week because I think there\u2019s plenty of room to warn Catholics not to \u201close their saltiness\u201d<\/a>\u00a0without implying that the people they move among are necessarily corrupting. \u00a0I\u2019d expect folks who took this passage too much to heart to be too defensive against external threats and not-vigilant-enough against internal ones (at the scale of an individual church or conscience).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2015, I\u2019m reading and blogging through\u00a0Ronald Knox\u2019s\u00a0collection of sermons on Christian exemplars,\u00a0Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes. \u00a0Every Monday (kinda), I\u2019ll be writing about the next portrait in the book, so you\u2019re welcome to peruse them all and\/or read along. In this week\u2019s chapter of Captive Flames, Roland Knox discusses the stories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":11545,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[240],"class_list":["post-11544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spiritual-practice","tag-knox-bookclub"],"yoast_head":"\nReceiving Fraternal Correction from Non-Catholics [Saints Bookclub]<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In 2015, I\u2019m reading and blogging through\u00a0Ronald Knox\u2019s\u00a0collection of sermons on Christian exemplars,\u00a0Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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