Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Courtney Murray, on ‘The Erroneous Conscience,’ Freedom, and Tolerance)

"The erroneous conscience is endowed with internal personal freedom. It has the right not to be forced to abandon its religious convictions and practices and not to be coerced into acceptance of the true religious faith, against its own subjectively sincere mandate. It also has a right to reverence and respect on the part of others, and others have the duty of paying it reverence and respect. The respect, however, is not owed to the erroneous conscience as erroneous, since no respect is due to error, but to the man in error who is still endowed with that measure of human dignity which is synonymous with internal personal freedom. The duty here is therefore of the order of charity; its proper name is tolerance.”—American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray (1904-1967), The Problem of Religious Freedom (1965)

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on a Republic’s ‘Wide Differences of Opinion’)

“In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.”— U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “Citizenship in a Republic” speech delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, Apr. 23, 1910, reprinted in The Man in the Arena: Speeches andEssays by Theodore Roosevelt, edited by John Allen Gable (1990)

W.H. Auden, With Wise Advice for the New Year

“Convict our pride of its offense

In all things, even penitence,

Instruct us in the civil art

Of making from the muddled heart

A desert and a city where

The thoughts that have to labor there

May find locality and peace,

And pent-up feelings their release.”— English poet-critic W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter” (1940)

“New Year Letter” is far longer than my favorite W.H. Auden poem, “In Memory of W.B.Yeats.” But if it didn’t have that elegy's concentrated power, it issued an equally ringing summons to the best human impulses toward tolerance and hope only a few months into a second world war that had arisen from the most hideous brutality the world had ever known, as I think you'll see in the above lines.

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on Toleration)

“Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.”—Anglo-Irish statesman/political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), “Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters,” March 7, 1773), in Celebrated Speeches of Chatham, Burke, and Erskine (1851)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on ‘The Charity of a Christian Man’)

“The charity of a Christian man knoweth no property: let him love good men in Christ, evil men for Christ’s sake, which so loved us first when we were yet his enemies, that he bestowed himself on us altogether for our redemption: let him embrace the one because they be good: the other nevertheless to make them good: he shall hate no man at all, no more verily than a faithful physician hateth a sick man: let him be an enemy only unto vices: the greater the disease is, the greater cure will pure charity put thereto: he is an adulterer, he hath committed sacrilege, he is a Turk: let a Christian man defy the adulterer, not the man: He must defy and abhor the vices, but not the man. Let him despise the committer of sacrilege, not the man: let him kill the Turk, not the man: let him find the means that the evil man perish such as he hath made himself to be, but let the man be saved whom God made: let him will well, wish well, and do well, to all men unfeignedly: neither hurt them which have deserved it, but do good to them which have not deserved it; let him be glad of all men’s commodities as well as of his own, and also be sorry for all men’s harms none otherwise than for his own. For verily this is that which the apostle commandeth: to weep with them that weep, to joy with them that joy, yea let him rather take another man’s harm grievouser than his own: and of his brother’s wealth be gladder than of his own. It is not a Christian man’s part to think on this wise: what have I to do with this fellow, I know not whether he be black or white, he is unknown to me, he is a stranger to me, he never did aught for me, he hath hurt me sometime, but did me never good. Think none of these things: remember only for what deserving can those things which Christ hath done for thee, which would his kindness done to thee, should be recompensed, not in himself, but in thy neighbour.”— Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), The Manual of a Christian Knight (1501)

Quote of the Day (Michael Walzer, on Toleration and Difference)

“Toleration makes difference possible; difference makes toleration necessary.”— Michael Walzer, On Toleration (1997)

In memoriam: the Orlando shooting victims. Never has toleration been more necessary, in the American double experiment in pluralism and democracy, than now, when a sexual minority is massacred for being different and an entire religious minority falls under suspicion for the crimes of a small subset.

Quote of the Day (Abdullah Saeed, on Islam and Religious Freedom)

“Despite current challenges, the degree of freedom available to many Muslims, particularly those who are based in intellectually free societies (many of which are in the West), can be used to challenge those who threaten religious liberty. Muslims, who now make up roughly 20 percent of the world’s population, have a political and religious duty to take into account the important values and norms that have extensive grounding in Islam’s most sacred texts and its own tradition. In doing so, Muslim thinkers will be returning to their most important sources of authority, the Qur’an and the Prophet, in support of tolerance and religious liberty.”-- Abdullah Saeed, “The Islamic Case for Religious Liberty,” First Things, November 2011