Sentences with phrase «nobler human aspirations»

The main point of all my writing on this subject has been to raise our sights above what Pope John Paul II called «economism» — a view of economies driven solely by a materialist, economic understanding of self - interest, the profit motive, cupidity, and greed, and a denial of all the nobler human aspirations.

Not exact matches

And as Cheever's confession to Hersey makes clear, the real stress lies more on the human choice between darkness and light than on the sovereignty of God's grace — the divine goodness which must redeem not only our grosser sins but our noblest aspirations as well.

In his recent book, Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity, he offers «four benefits» of mortality: interest and engagement, suggesting that adding, say, twenty years to the human life span would not proportionately increase the pleasures of life; seriousness and aspiration, proposing that the knowledge that our life is limited is what leads us to take life seriously and passionately; beauty and love, presenting the idea that it is precisely their perishability that makes, for instance, flowers beautiful to us, just as the coming and going of spring makes that season all the more meaningful; and, finally, virtue and moral excellence, by which he means the virtuous and noble deeds that mortality makes possible, including the sacrifice of our own life for a worthy cause.

Like Christianity, secular humanism has many noble aspirations for human society, such as peace, justice and equality.

What this Devil needs to encourage is the human tendency to identify as liberating the reduction of any aspiration, however seemingly noble or virtuous, to bodily wastes, as if he were an ardent press agent for the scatological mysticism of the French writer Georges Bataille.