flâneur

Recovering Piety - Comment Magazine

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Piety is key to renewing our institutions, because it entails character traits like virtue, devotion, and sacrifice for the common good.

Again, Waldzell resembles a monastic community: young men leave their homes, schools, and families to join it, foregoing marriage and career. Joseph has pledged his whole being to the scholarly world of Castalia; if that world is fundamentally frivolous and useless, the definitive choice of his life was a catastrophic mistake, and he is wasting his energies and his gifts. This is why, when Plinio can deflect an unanswerable argument with a witticism, Joseph has to go away and think hard about Plinio’s strongest claims. The stakes for him are very high—and not just for him: the young scholars…

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