Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jean Bethke Elshtain, on Peace, Love and Justice)

“This is where love comes in — love of God and love of neighbor — and this is where justice comes in as well. Augustine's alternative definition [of the commonwealth] starts with love. ‘A people is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.’ It ‘follows that to observe the character of a particular people, we must examine the objects of its love. No single man can create a commonwealth. There is no ur-founder, no great bringer of order. It begins in ties of fellowship, in households, clans and tribes, in earthly love and its many discontents. And it begins in an ontology of peace, not war.”—American ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), Augustine and the Limits of Politics (1996)