The Life And Work Of St Augustine - amazonia.fiocruz.br

For that: The Life And Work Of St Augustine

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In early January, The Washington Post reported that poultry plants that received waivers to increase slaughter line speeds were 10 times more likely to have coronavirus cases as plants without waivers. The freedom given to plant owners Augustije increase speeds compelled line workers to face The Life And Work Of St Augustine brutal choice: Be exposed to higher risk of infection or leave their low-wage jobs. This unjust tale from the front lines of the pandemic may seem a far cry from the crucial moment in President Joe Biden's inaugural address when he wrapped his moving call for the unity of the American people in the words of the fourth century Catholic theologian St.

Biden said: "Many centuries ago, Saint Augustine, a saint of my church, wrote that a people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love. Https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/essay/pathetic-fallacy-examples/ox-tongue-river-essay.php, yes, the truth.

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But it's important to focus on the story of the poultry plant workers because it commands us to consider the most important way that St. Augustine can contribute to the challenge of American unity: Not so much by telling us what our objects of love should be, as much as by showing us how we ought to love. For Augustine, love both unmasks injustice and creates a people.

First, then, the unmasking. Indeed, it's hard to argue with the list of common objects that Biden provides. And he surely means them well. But Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti sounded a cautionary note about the use of such value words in our time. They have been bent and shaped to serve as tools for domination, as meaningless tags that can be used to justify any action Here St. Augustine can help. To him, love was like desire: All of us are drawn by a "weight" as Augustine often called love toward good or evil. Moreover, all our loves — even our best ones — are hobbled from within and fraught with the possibility of sin. The Life And Work Of St Augustine way of putting things may https://amazonia.fiocruz.br/scdp/essay/mormon-bank-utah/comm-4331.php his thought a gloomy cast perhaps especially in his writing about sex. But his clear-eyed sense of love and sin also provides a way to see how domineering self-love can distort good things — for instance, the value words in Biden's speech — that we might otherwise share in common.

Examples from the last years abound.

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Augustine understood that self-love can luxuriate in wrong itself: Augustie can love the cruelty of separating children from their parents at the border for the sake of enjoying the cruelty itself — no matter how many pious formulations we offer up about the need to enforce immigration law. Or, with St. Augustine, we can see self-love and love of God in high tension: Love for sin fires hate for the good.

Here would hardly have been surprised at the Trumpian love for lies and power that was contemptuous of every truth teller — Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Electoral College, the Black American voters who refused to play his racist game — standing in his way. For Augustine, we face the constant temptation to seize things for ourselves — freedom, democracy, even God — instead of understanding such goods as belonging also to others. And here we can return to the poultry plant waivers and OOf.

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On one hand, St. Augustine's keen sense link the oppressive dynamisms of self-love debunks the appeal to what otherwise may appear as the anodyne freedom behind the waivers themselves. In his view, it is no surprise that the self-love that seeks the freedom to increase line speeds in the middle of a pandemic also seeks to coerce others to face an increased risk of death. But we can take Augustine's debunking one step further when we consider that the appeal to the neoliberal freedom to get such a waiver is replicated in many different ways in American life — perhaps most visibly in the call to freedom behind the reckless refusal to wear a mask.]