Covenant Zone Reconvenes

After a brief respite, the Covenant Zone bloggers will be renewing our regular Thursday night meetings in the atrium of the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library, 7-9pm. Please join us if you can and would like to discuss the renewal of Western culture and particularly of Canadian nationhood and democracy. Everyone, of any faith, is welcome, as long as you are committed to rational and open-ended discussion in good faith that our common purpose is to work to help guarantee and extend the freedom of every Canadian. To this end, we may freely quote from, say, a Christian writer, without giving the impression that we are trying to convert people to Christianity, instead of simply to a higher appreciation of human truth. On this note, a thought for the day:

The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he "likes" them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly [even those he does not like], finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

The same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become - and so on in a vicious circle for ever.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or a railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 111.