Ponder: "when all the 'practical' problems have been solved"

Neither studying microscopic sea creatures nor studying Shakespeare nor designing exquisite copes nor compiling medieval sequences will ever be practical in a direct, worldly sense. Yet these are the small (and large) disciplines of life in community that must be sustained if we are ever to be an integral whole.

 Sure, we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked and comfort the afflicted. We must do those things, and woe to us if our peculiar competencies are merely a distraction from doing so.

But I submit that true vocation, true work, is not, when seriously done, a distraction from something more important. It is the important thing, the human thing, that remains when all the “practical” problems have been solved, that remains when new problems arise that will never be imagined by our methodologies of utility. The question should always be: when we satisfy our need for material progress and success, what will remain? Lord help us if it is a world with nothing interesting to learn.

Sam Keyes, “Details Matter: On the Disciplines, Covenant, 29 Sep. 2016.

Ponder: "the chief obstacle and the only possible solution"

"In the early 1990s the cod fishery along Canada’s Atlantic coast disappeared almost overnight due to overfishing. The ecosystem was pushed beyond what it could bear, and the fishery simply and suddenly collapsed. There were no fish left. In 1992 the fishery was closed for good, and the cod population has never recovered. Neither the cod nor their prey nor the ocean itself cared a whit about the collapse. But tens of thousands of people in hundreds of coastal communities suddenly found themselves unemployed, and a way of life centuries in the making came to an end.

God said to Noah and his sons, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” (Gen. 9:1-3)

With great power comes great responsibility. Our reason enables us to approach the boundaries of its own capacity and gesture beyond it, toward eternity. Here lies the mystery of our status as priests and kings of creation. Reason, the thing that separates us from brute beasts, does not liberate us from animality, but it liberates animality itself, for the actualization of a potential that cannot be actualized without reason. Cod do not fall into a depression when they run up against the limits of their codness; they accept it without wonder. And people who see our own species as the chief obstacle to conservation are only half right. Man is at once the chief obstacle and the only possible solution."

Will Brown, “A Catechismof Nature: Reason and the Destiny of Animal Life”  Covenant 3 Mar 2016