“Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal.”
My favorite movie is You’ve Got Mail. In it, Kathleen Kelly, owner of a small children’s book shop, quips the wisdom above when Joe Fox, operator of the mega-store that puts her shop under, tries to excuse himself with the line, “It wasn’t personal, it was business.”
In my work at Word on Fire, I am surrounded by great theological and philosophical thinkers who face the issues of the secularization and morally relativization of society, citing the most intellectual minds of the Church to demonstrate the smart, beautiful, and rich tradition of Catholicism and its place in our culture, quoting Aquinas and von Balthasar in response to Nietzsche and Sartre, drawing out eternal truths and perennial heresies from the recurring societal milieus. And, my favorite movie is You’ve Got Mail. However, recently this seemingly unimportant line from my unassuming, late-90’s chick-flick favorite again rang true: “Whatever else anything is, it ought to begin by being personal."
Last Wednesday evening, I attended a debate at my alma mater, Notre Dame, in which atheist mogul Christopher Hitchens took on public policy expert and Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza in a dual entitled, “The God Debate: Is Religion the Problem?” ...