Sublime

To connect Taylor with Ehrenberg, what modernity considers to be a mental ailment is always connected to its ethic, to its assertion of what is good.

Therapy is powerful in our secular age because it can go inward but without disturbing the buffer (mainly because it operates only at the level of epistemology and avoids ontology, essence, and, often, explicit moral categories).

What person who does what this woman does has not been there? How I admire them and cherish them. I see them each day, serving in a variety of ways, dealing with the heartbreaking realities of the poor: frustration; violent transference; physical and mental sickness; rejection; police harassment; loneliness; hunger for food, friendship, and purpose

This means that all of us have a primary responsibility as leaders, as far as it depends on us, to be well-rested, soaked in prayer and contemplation, and free of personal fear and anxiety. We need to start and end each day as children of our heavenly Father, friends of Jesus, and grateful recipients of the Holy Spirit. We need to pray for genuine

This is precisely what the weak do everywhere. Through bitter experience they have learned how to exercise extreme care, how to behave so as to reduce the threat of immediate danger from their environment. Fear thus becomes a form of life assurance, making possible the continuation of physical existence with a minimum of active violence.

We are trained to look honestly at our own spiritual and religious hang-ups or baggage, so as not to project our unprocessed dramas or grief onto those we are called to serve. We are trained to work with the energies of fear.

The inner world, while more than ever an intricate edifice (thanks to modern psychology), nevertheless appears closed to the pastor. The modern self, able to be created in the first place thanks to the pastoral work of Augustine, has turned on the pastoral.