Into the Friar (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Into the Friar (2010)

chicagoreader.com

27 pointseversowhatev5 comments

Interesting piece. One might think that abandoning the maelstrom of modern life with all its trappings would be a sign of intellectual or emotional disturbance. Seemingly not.

TIL: Wimple

Think of how many of us wage slaves dream of someday having a place of our own to potter around doing only that we really want.

Monasteries are basically that for people who love praying.

So if the slogan of our age is "Cash Rules Everything Around Me", were the medievals into vitamin F, no matter which their order?

    laboratores - Farming Rules Everything Around Me
    bellatores  -  Fealty Rules Everything Around Me
    oratores    -   Faith Rules Everything Around Me

> I’m fairly convinced that most of our foundational assumptions about how we construe the religious Other were solidified in the Middle Ages and the period following.

I hope he's correct; I suspect much of the religious Other baggage came from when the early christians actually were being persecuted. (one can understand the government persecution; from the Roman POV, they were a bunch of atheist pinko commies)

Also on "religious Other", compare John Milton:

> The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:

  ... a description of the ... new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold 
  blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert 
  civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together 
  with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to 
  make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can 
  display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines....

In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy. Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pa...

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