educating the poor

I get the feeling that, when serving the poor (literally, spiritually, emotionally), people tend to look at them as in some way inferior. This could be as innocent as considering them the younger brethren, while we consider ourselves as counselors or helpers to them...like we are doing them a service.

We are always ready to make a saint or
prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little
kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or
prophet was something quite different. The medieval saint or prophet
was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little
kindly advice to the educated.
--Chesteron's Heretics

It is the poor who teach us. Stop preaching to them. Start listening.

effortless virtues

It's been said that nothing worth anything comes easy. A problem arises when the Christian, living in this microwave society, aims to achieve a virtue--patience, faith, hope, love--using the same effort it takes to make a pop-tart.

The very virtue we aim for must be defined first. Take, for instance, patience. Anyone can be patient with pleasant people--but that is by definition not the virtue of patience, it is mere reciprocity. The virtue of patience does not arise until you have met one who absolutely does not deserve your patience. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Similarly, with faith, it is said, [y]ou believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that. In other words, there is no such thing as a virtue that comes easily:

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
-- Chesterton's Heretics, with my emphasis

clearly ambiguous

As the election draws near, I have been thinking a lot about my own position. Yet the more I think of it, the more torn I am. The problem with the bipartisan system is that you must necessarily choose one or the other. One must force himself into either a square or a rhombus hole, even if you happen to be a triangular peg. Even more difficult is that Christianity doesn't fit easily into either. In my opinion, if Christianity were to become its own political party, it would be right-leaning on social/moral issues and left-leaning on economic and taxation issues.

Social conservatism and Christianity strongly overlap; the two are mostly in agreement with respect to marriage, divorce, homosexuality and abortion. But not the whole of conservatism is in agreement with Christianity. When it comes to taxation, the conservative tends to take the view of "every man for himself." The conservative says "I worked hard for my money, so why should I have to give it back?" Thus, the safety nets like health insurance are to be kept to a bare minimum. But this is a tricky issue. In an ideal world, people should be giving anyway. Unfortunately, they don't. In a secular society, then, there has to be some way to ensure that those who need assistance get it (with limitations on abuse, of course).

Likewise, conservatives believe that the market economy should be kept free and government regulation kept to a minimum. The problem, of course, is greed. Without regulation and enforcement, greed is bound to take hold of major corporations whose sole purpose it is to increase its wealth and size. This focus on profits necessarily leads to a disregard of morality. Even Greenspan - a strong advocate of free markets - has conceded his grave error.

In short, certain aspects of conservatism work in an ideal world - where people willingly give to the poor, use guns only for self-protection, and corporate greed is nonexistant. But such idealism is a fantasy and is downright dangerous.