Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Matt EmersonMay 15, 2014
Saint Augustine and his mother Monica (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Ross Douthat is not the only New York Times writer to hit upon some very Catholic themes. David Brooks's recent column turns to St. Augustine to reflect upon the path to personal knowledge:

The highest rung on the stairway to understanding is intimacy. Our master-teacher here is Augustine. As he aged, Augustine came to reject those who thought they could understand others from some detached objective stance.

He came to believe that it take selfless love to truly know another person. Love is a form of knowing and being known. Affection motivates you to want to see everything about another. Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe, but to seek union — to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.

There is a tendency now, especially for those of us in the more affluent classes, to want to use education to make life more predictable, to seek control as the essential good, to emphasize data that masks the remorseless unpredictability of individual lives. But people engaged in direct contact with problems like teenage pregnancy are cured of those linear illusions. Those of us who work with data and for newspapers probably should be continually reminding ourselves to bow down before the knowledge of participation, to defer to the highest form of understanding, which is held by those who walk alongside others every day, who know the first names, who know the smells and fears.

 

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
David Pasinski
11 years 1 month ago
I placed David Brooks column on our refrigerator and read it to my older teens. He is the conservative this liberal most respects and that column is a classic. Thank you, David!
Matt Emerson
11 years 1 month ago

David, thanks for reading and reply. It's a good column indeed!

The latest from america

A Reflection for the Thursday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time, by Ashley McKinless
Ashley McKinlessJuly 08, 2025
No one ever expected a U.S.-born pope. In this first-ever I “Inside the Vatican” Deep Dive series, those who know him best reveal who Pope Leo XIV—“the American pope”—really is. In Episode 1, we hear from the genealogist who uncovered his Louisiana roots, a teacher, and fellow Augustinian friars
Inside the VaticanJuly 08, 2025
The Vatican Synod office has released a set of guidelines for local churches and bishops to implement the proposals of the recent Synod on Synodality.
When Miami native Tom Llamas was named “NBC Nightly News” anchor following the retirement of Lester Holt, one of the first phone calls he placed was to the rector/president of his Jesuit high school alma mater.