{"id":10801,"date":"2010-10-17T12:16:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-17T16:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/?p=10801"},"modified":"2010-10-17T12:16:18","modified_gmt":"2010-10-17T16:16:18","slug":"the-lottery-and-moral-vocabulary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2010\/10\/the-lottery-and-moral-vocabulary\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lottery and Moral Vocabulary"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Denver prelate made his remarks on Oct. 15 at the \u201cFaith in the Public Square\u201d seminar sponsored by the Diocese of Victoria. He opened his speech with a reference to Shirley Jackson\u2019s famed short story \u201cThe Lottery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s story \u2013 set in rural 1940s America \u2013 features the tale of a small town that gathers every year to implore an unnamed force to grant a good corn harvest the people. Each year, town members draw a piece of paper from a wooden box to see who will be chosen for human sacrifice. A young mother ends up drawing the ominous black slip and is stoned to death by the community as part of the annual ritual.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on Jackson\u2019s piece, Archbishop Chaput cited professor Kay Haugaard\u2019s analysis on how young people in academia in decades past would react passionately to the tale with intense classroom debate and discussion.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe said that in the early 1970s, students who read the story voiced shock and indignation,\u201d Archbishop Chaput noted. \u201cThe tale led to vivid conversations on big topics \u2013 the meaning of sacrifice and tradition; the dangers of group-think and blind allegiance to leaders; the demands of conscience and the consequences of cowardice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSometime in the mid-1990s, however, reactions began to change,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaugaard described one classroom discussion that \u2013 to me \u2013 was more disturbing than the story itself. The students had nothing to say except that the story bored them. So Haugaard asked them what they thought about the villagers ritually sacrificing one of their own for the sake of the harvest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne student, speaking in quite rational tones, argued that many cultures have traditions of human sacrifice,\u201d the archbishop continued. \u201cAnother said that the stoning might have been part of \u2018a religion of long standing,\u2019 and therefore acceptable and understandable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another student brought up the idea of \u201cmulticultural sensitivity,\u201d saying she learned in school that if \u201cit\u2019s a part of a person\u2019s culture, we are taught not to judge.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought of Haugaard\u2019s experience with ‘The Lottery’ as I got ready for this brief talk,\u201d the prelate explained.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur culture is doing catechesis every day. It works like water dripping on a stone, eroding people\u2019s moral and religious sensibilities, and leaving a hole where their convictions used to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHaugaard\u2019s experience,\u201d he added, \u201cteaches us that it took less than a generation for this catechesis to produce a group of young adults who were unable to take a moral stand against the ritual murder of a young woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNot because they were cowards. But because they lost their moral vocabulary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChristians in my country and yours \u2013 and throughout the West, generally \u2013 have done a terrible job of transmitting our faith to our own children and to the culture at large,\u201d Archbishop Chaput remarked.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of changing the culture around us, we Christians have allowed ourselves to be changed by the culture. We\u2019ve compromised too cheaply. We\u2019ve hungered after assimilating and fitting in. And in the process, we\u2019ve been bleached out and absorbed by the culture we were sent to make holy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to confess that, and we need to fix it,\u201d he asserted. \u201cFor too many of us, Christianity is not a filial relationship with the living God, but a habit and an inheritance. We\u2019ve become tepid in our beliefs and naive about the world. We\u2019ve lost our evangelical zeal. And we\u2019ve failed in passing on our faith to the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Renewing Catholic catechesis then, Archbishop Chaput added, \u201chas little to do with techniques, or theories, or programs, or resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe central issue is whether we ourselves really do believe. Catechesis is not a profession. It\u2019s a dimension of discipleship. If we\u2019re Christians, we\u2019re each of us called to be teachers and missionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the Denver prelate noted, \u201cwe can\u2019t share what we don\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we\u2019re embarrassed about Church teachings, or if we disagree with them, or if we\u2019ve decided that they\u2019re just too hard to live by, or too hard to explain, then we\u2019ve already defeated ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to really believe what we claim to believe,\u201d he stressed. \u201cWe need to stop calling ourselves \u2018Catholic\u2019 if we don\u2019t stand with the Church in her teachings \u2013 all of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his concluding remarks, Archbishop Chaput added that \u201cif we really are Catholic, or at least if we want to be, then we need to act like it with obedience and zeal and a fire for Jesus Christ in our hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGod gave us the faith in order to share it. This takes courage. It takes a deliberate dismantling of our own vanity. When we do that, the Church is strong. When we don\u2019t, she grows weak. It\u2019s that simple.\u201d [Source<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When The Lottery was first published in the New Yorker, Shirley Jackson got a lot of hate mail from people very upset by the story. She later replied via another publication.<\/p>\n

“Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story’s readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.”<\/p>\n

That students now have a totally different reaction to this story I guess could not be called shocking in the Culture of Death, but disturbing all the same what moral relativism under the trojan horse of multicultural sensitivity has wrought. Good thing the British did not have this phony sensitivity in the face of Sati (wife burning) in India.<\/p>\n

This though is exactly what the underlying atheist assumptions of modern education has led to. When there are no moral absolutes and no God to pin right and wrong to, we have to then tie moral values we inherently believe exist to culture and a sort of societal getting along. So when you do this the students reactions are totally to be expected and within the framework of moral relativism. Cultures change, thus moral values change is the obvious assumption those taught under this system make.<\/p>\n

What I love about Archbishop Chaput is that he can take the changing reactions to The Lottery and show the defect that caused them and at the time go on to give us an example of what we need to do. This call is to the individual level in growing in holiness and living lives totally congruent with the faith we profess. These changes occurred within a generation and through true catechesis they can be reversed, a least in the sphere that engages in true catechesis. Families, public schools and too many other institutions including religious ones will likely keep to teaching a morality tied to in-effect nothing which is like anchoring a ship to a helium balloon.<\/p>\n

As for the late Shirley Jackson, she is a fabulous writer who wrote one of the best pieces of psychological horror fiction ever “The Haunting of Hill House” and could also write hilariously such as in “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Denver prelate made his remarks on Oct. 15 at the \u201cFaith in the Public Square\u201d seminar sponsored by the Diocese of Victoria. He opened his speech with a reference…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-punditry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10802,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10801\/revisions\/10802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}