Quote of the Day (Thomas Cahill, on History as ‘Narratives of Grace’)

“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.”—American historian, editor and academic Thomas Cahill (1940-2022), How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (1995)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Cahill, on the ‘Dream of Something New’)

“Out of mortal imagination comes a dream of something new, something better, something yet to happen, something—in the future.”―Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (1998)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Cahill, on Judaism’s Contribution to Democracy)

“[B]ecause capitalism and communism are processive faiths without God, each is a form of madness—a fantasy without a guarantee. Democracy, in contrast, grows directly out of the Israelite vision of individuals, subjects of value because they are images of God, each with a unique and personal destiny. There is no way that it could ever have been ‘self-evident that all men are created equal' without the intervention of the Jews.”—Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (1999)