John Barron Quotes

Thoughtful Christians must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion. We must continually preach, as John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth. — BISHOP BARRON

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that “beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.” There is “an ethic, even a ‘spirituality’ of artistic service which contributes [to] the life and renewal of a people,” because “every genuine art form, in its own way, is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world.

Ours is a society so immersed in the sea of video reactions that there are little old ladies out there who know Hoss Cartwright is more real than their next door neighbors. Everyone of value to them is an image. A totem. A phosphor-dot wraith whose hurts and triumphs are created from the magic of a scenarist’s need to make the next payment on his Porsche. (I recommend a book titled Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, for a more complete, and horrifying analysis of this phenomenon. It’s an Avon paperback, so it shouldn’t trouble you too much to pick it up.) But because of this acceptance of the strangers who appear on the home screen, ours has become a society where shadow and reality intermix to the final elimination of any degree of rational selectivity on the part of those whose lives are manipulated: by the carnivores who flummox them, and the idols they choose to worship. I don’t know that there’s any answer to this. If we luck out and we get a John Kennedy or a Leonard Nimoy (who, strangely enough, tie in to one another by the common denominator of being humane), then we can’t call it a bad thing. But if we wind up with a public image that governs us as Ronald Reagan and Joe Pyne govern us, then we are in such deep trouble the mind turns to aluminum thinking of it.

Nevertheless, the radio continued to blare forth statistics demonstrating how under the visionary leadership of the gifted agronomist Krushchev, Soviet agriculture was overcoming the errors of Stalin and producing ever-larger quantities of meat, milk, butter, bread and other foodstuffs. If we have so much bread, why am I standing in line at four A.M., hoping I can buy some before it runs out? And Milk! There has been no milk in all Rubtsovsk for five days and no meat for two weeks. Well, as they say, if you want milk, just take your pail to the radio. But why does the radio keep announcing something which anybody with eyes knows is not true?

John Huntington eyed Suzanne Barron across her very stylish desk in her very stylish office. She was stylish herself—classy,

Except John Barron was as real as George Washington’s cherry tree. Trump, who would later become the forty-fifth president of the United States, completely made him up.

Aristotle said that the best activities are the most useless. This is because such things are not simply means to a further end but are done entirely for their own sake. Thus watching a baseball game is more important than getting a haircut, and cultivating a friendship is more valuable than making money. The game and the friendship are goods that are excellent in themselves, while getting a haircut and making money are in service of something beyond themselves. This is also why the most important parts of the newspaper are the sports section and the comics, and not, as we would customarily think, the business and political reports. In this sense, the most useless activity of all is the celebration of the Liturgy, which is another way of saying that it is the most important thing we could possibly do. There is no higher good than to rest in God, to honor him for his kindness, to savor his sweetness—in a word, to praise him. As we have seen in chapter three, every good comes from God, reflects God, and leads back to God, and, therefore, all value is summed up in the celebration of the Liturgy, the supreme act by which we commune with God. This is why the great liturgical theologian Romano Guardini said that the liturgy is a consummate form of play. We play football and we play musical instruments because it is simply delightful to do so, and we play in the presence of the Lord for the same reason. In chapter one I spoke of Adam in the garden as being the first priest, which is another way of saying that his life, prior to the fall, was entirely liturgical. At play in the field of the Lord, Adam, with every move and thought, effortlessly gave praise to God. As Dietrich von Hildebrand indicated, this play of liturgy is what rightly orders the personality, since we find interior order in the measure that we surrender everything in us to God. We might say that the Liturgy bookends the entire Scripture, for the priesthood of Adam stands at the beginning of the sacred text and the heavenly Liturgy of the book of Revelation stands at the end. In the closing book of the Bible, John the visionary gives us a glimpse into the heavenly court, and he sees priests, candles, incense, the reading of a sacred text, the gathering of thousands in prayer, prostrations and other gestures of praise, and the appearance of the Lamb of God. He sees,

The most oft-cited line of Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Doctrine is situated in this context: “In a higher world it may be otherwise; but here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” So indeed, Pope John’s Newman-like image of the “flourishing garden of life” effectively holds off a stuffy traditionalism.

In his first letter Saint John says, “What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life—for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father” (1 Jn 1:1–2).

The poet John Donne wrote that no man is an island — “every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’’ But when the continent is a mile away, it is not easy being the man who owns the island. “I thought I would have great thoughts out here,” he said, standing on his doorstep on Columbia Island, the smaller of the two. Many of the thoughts he has had in 14 years as an island owner were about money. He said he had spent $8 million on renovations, including solar panels for electricity and a desalination unit for drinking water.