💌: Sharing a bit of my heart today. Can we have a nonpolitical church in these times? How about a nonpartisan one? This letter is free for all to read.
We live in an age of despair, unsurprisingly, for we have set up an array of circumstances most conducive to it. Consider contemporary society and what it is ordered towards. You may surprised to contemplate just how many areas of modern life lead people down dark pathways of lonely despair.
The Cultivation of Despair: How Modern Society Breeds Hopelessness
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I just got back from teaching my class and every word of it this is true, this is no exaggeration. He is writing from an American university but it is exactly the same in Canada.
Does anyone know why the comments section was turned off on Yascha Mounk's "The World's Happiness Report is a Sham" column that TFP published on Monday? I had a comment I wanted to make but by the time I got to it on Monday afternoon, the comments were shut down and that's the first time I've seen TFP do that on an article. I guess, just for the record, my comments are that the Cantril Ladder question they asked was what was based on the "best POSSIBLE life for you" vs the "worst POSSIBLE life for you" - and if you live in Finland, a Socialist country, like much of Northern Europe, your possibilities are pretty limited, so their citizens resign themselves to their place on the ladder. They are not an aspirational or dynamic society like America. I was curious about this last year when the results were released and, like this year, it was topped by small, Socialist, cold-weather countries so I read the report and in it the Scandinavian respondents seemed somewhat bewildered by being considered "the happiest people in the world" and said that really, it's just that they're not very unhappy rather than being overtly happy. Also, my next door neighbor for the last 30 years was born and raised in Finland, however she doesn't really like to go back to Finland to see her family because the Finnish people are so dour and unfriendly compared to Americans (she's been an American citizen for about 45 years). And she's a loyal Democrat!