Tag: torture

Spirituality

Ubuntu

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Desmond Tutu, commenting on someone who has ubuntu, says:

This means they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring, and compassionate. They share what they have. It also means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs. … A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are … what dehumanizes you, inexorably dehumanizes me.

From No Future without Forgiveness

Random thoughts

The sixteen most scandalous charges

Karl MöllerLeave a comment

Another review from Third Way Jan./Feb. 2013. This time by Nick Spencer, who discusses Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, which tells the story of a Renaissance bibliophile. I’m not sure that I’m that interested in the book, but the concluding lines of Spencer’s review really made me laugh. Here they are:

the book’s line on the charges read against Pope John XXIII at Council of Constance is worth its cover price alone: ‘Fearing their effect on public opinion, the council decided to suppress the sixteen most scandalous charges – never subsequently revealed – and accused the pontiff of simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture, and murder.’

Now, what else could he have possibly done?