Friday, April 17, 2015
Psalm, Chapter 27, verse 7
7 Though an army
encamp against me, my heart does not fear; Though war be waged against
me, even then do I trust.
In
today’s video Father Kubicki relays a story of an imprisoned Bishop in Vietnam
who did have an army encamped against him and his trust and victory through
Christ.
In
today’s book study of Character is Destiny[1] Eric
Hoffer is McCain’s example of a man who demonstrates for us the characteristic
of INDUSTRY. Christ asks us to carry our
cross daily to be industrious in our living out the gospel. Hoffer was a
longshoreman, author, and philosopher who explained the purpose of freedom in
the way we develop our societies.
Hoffer
in his writing argued that honest labor gave purpose and dignity to a man. Hoffer’s
ideas and thoughts confront our culture’s obsession with individualism,
hedonism, and minimalism by portraying the value of industry in man.
Hoffer
who was blinded as a youth for eight years due to a fall had an insatiable hunger
for the reading of books; fearing he would lose his sight again. He was a
modern example of what the man born blind in the gospel story life must have
been like. Hoffer’s self-studies revealed to him the idea that the absence of
self-esteem caused people to surrender themselves to causes and may have been
the root cause of the mass movements of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Hoffman argues that freedom offers man a means to self-esteem and may help us
to understand the contributing factors in the current Islamic extremist
movements.[2]
Next
week we will be studying the character trait of resilience of Abraham
Lincoln in the face of insurmountable odds.
[2]
Eric Hoffer. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
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