3 ms·

personalism shot/chaser: bonhoeffer’s “on folly”.

• tptacek 4y ago
  I said downthread that it might be hard to come up with a more inapposite quote for a story about skepticism of wrongdoing, and you'd've one-upped me here. :)
  • renewiltord 4y ago
    I believe the quote, with context excised and transported here, has value without its original subject. i.e. if someone had written it without being C.S.Lewis talking about Nazis, I would have upvoted them. And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning solely from text.
    • tptacek 4y ago
      If the quote hadn't been italicized and followed with "(C.S. Lewis)" I wouldn't have responded. And, if I'm misreading the intent of the quote --- that it isn't being used as a sort of generic "be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing and generous with mitigating claims", well, then, I'm just wrong. But if the quote was intended the way I think it was (see previous sentence): it's being used to say almost literally the opposite of what Lewis was saying. More generally, on any thread owing to a Quillette article, I think we can do much worse than to have a curious conversation about C.S. Lewis (and, for that matter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
      • renewiltord 4y ago
        Absolutely understand. I was sort of alluding to that with the last line (one must, after all, source what one is repeating). And for what it's worth, I enjoyed what you and the other fellow mentioned because I am neither familiar with Lewis nor Bonhoeffer. More "I think that other guy meant this" intent from me, and less "you shouldn't have said what you did".