From Rod Dreher

• Why I have more in common with a gruff unbeliever like Hitch than I do with people who profess religion but reduce it to pudding.
• Reason, religion and moral behaviour. A goal of the moral life is to overcome the passions — not, to be clear, to live in total denial of the passions, but to gain control over them, lest they control you. Whatever one believes about the life of the spirit, to practice routine self-denial amounts to an exercise in increasing one’s neurological faculties of self-control.

Labels: the Catholic faith