Select VFR Articles; it's there for your perusal

When my son and I returned home from the football game last night (our team lost 6-3), we got on the computer and went to Webster's. Something was mentioned by one of us about the quality of the commenters over at VFR. At which point I recalled probably the most outstanding VFR comment I've ever had the good fortune to read...

That's right, I'm speaking of Kristor L's Christian apologetic which I personally cannot get enough of, and which I put up a permanent link to some weeks ago under Select VFR Articles in the left sidebar.

Indeed, as my wife, my son and I were discussing this topic, I said to them, "ya want to see a prime example of the quality of the comments over at VFR?, let me read this to you," and I began reading aloud Kristor's statements. Though they (my wife and son) seemed somewhat uninterested at first, I didn't get much further than the first couple of sentences before I knew I had their full and undivided attention, and I kept it throughout the entire reading, er, rather, Kristor kept it throughout, all I did was read.

Now, I'm not sure that I can nail down a single statement in the post, or even a couple of them as my favorites. The entire article is so good and so powerful that it is best read and studied as a whole before you break it down to its elements. But one portion which struck me as I was reading last night, and which I put a lot of emphasis on (and by the way, Kristor's skill in writing comes through as the sentences leading up to a particular point lend themselves very well to emphasizing the point in a climactic sort of fashion) during my audible reading was this paragraph:

Kristor writes:

That I am Christian makes me, not more like some other Christian--Lawrence, say, or St. Francis or Mother Teresa--but more like my own better self. At the same time, the more Christian I become, the more I will express Christian virtues, as Lawrence, Francis, and Teresa also all variously do. So with cultures. The effect upon any culture of conversion to Christianity should be, not its destruction, but that it should begin to learn how best to express its truest, best essence. If Christianity is the religion of Truth, then conversion thereto should make Greece a better, truer Greece, Russia a better, truer Russia, China a better, truer China. The reaction of any culture to Christianity should be to evoke and appropriate to itself from the whole body of universal catholic Truth those aspects thereof most pertinent to its parochial predicaments. The whole Truth is necessarily adequate to any creaturely situation. Any creature orienting itself properly in respect to the Truth cannot but find itself ennobled and more perfectly individuated thereby. And to the degree that any culture is truly converted, this beneficial effect should permeate it, down to its most trivial mundane details. Ceteris paribus, any Christian nation should find that it becomes ever happier, healthier, more prosperous--not because it is seeking these values, but precisely because it has, properly, sought first the values to be found in the Living God, of which all other values are derivates. When the landlord's values come first, the vineyard prospers, and likewise the laborers. This, even though they may suffer tortures and die martyrs.

This is just one of the several outstanding paragraphs of Kristor's apologetic writing. It is indeed that I've pointed out myself many times (though not nearly as eloquently as Kristor), when someone points to the goodness of America for instance, that yes, America can be said to be "good" and even the "best nation on earth" if the standard by which we measure her goodness is the "inferior goodness" other nations. But as Kristor so rightly notes, our nation's "goodness" is not to be measured by the "badness of," or relative to other nations. If that's the standard of measure, then all we can accomplish is to fool ourselves into believing that America, as she is now, is the ultimate in national goodness. Rather, our standard of measure for America's goodness should be America's better self. And when we hold ourselves up against that standard, our relative lack of goodness is immediately revealed to the honest observer. Furthermore, God, being the essence of goodness, it is his goodness that we should seek to emulate, as individuals as well as in our collective capacity.

End of initial post.