July 16, 2021

Letters to the Editor

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No letters were printed this week; here is the letter from eight weeks ago:

Reader: Who or what is our god these days?

This is to lend a voice of support to John F. Fink’s editorial in the April 30 issue of The Criterion, “Why Catholics are leaving.”

Fink attributes much of this to an overall liberalization of modern society, which in turn has caused some Catholics to view the Church as “too strict,” and many from their teenage years up simply “don’t want to hear it [Church teachings] anymore,” and leave or quit the Church.

To this, I would add the overall increase in commercialism and materialism of our modern and capitalistic society.

Almost everything anyone could ever want in life is now only a few clicks away via one’s computer—or even just their cell phone. The big questions in life now are only, “How do I get enough money to get them?”

Enlightenment era philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Thomas Hobbes predicted such a day, as wealth moved away from land and family, to simple paper currency. This last one especially created the belief that of all the things for which we used to rely on God, or each other, we could now simply get ourselves, given sufficient funds. This in turn “moved the goalpost” of our relationships away from God and each other, and toward “us and our money.”

A motto on our paper currency reads, “In God We Trust.” But who or what is our god these days?

-Sonny Shanks | Corydon

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