Every minute of every day, eternity presses in on us. Time passes, and our own time in the world is limited. So it is for every person we love. For Christians, then, certain questions become urgent. In the light of eternity, what does God ask from us? And what does it mean to be the “people of God” today, in a distracted and unbelieving age?
We’ve looked at many of the challenges now facing Catholics in America. We’ve also seen that the Church may be very different in size and influence over the next several decades. To bear a compelling witness to Jesus Christ, Catholics will need to be different as well—different, more resourceful, and far more deliberate in living our particular vocations with zeal and joy. So what does that look like? Where can we turn for guidance?
For answers, we might start with a letter written eighteen hundred years ago to a man named Diognetus.1 It’s a curious document for several reasons. First, it’s not from one of the apostles. Nor from any great, early Christian figure. Nor do the Church Fathers refer to it much. In fact, we’re not really sure who wrote it. All we know is that sometime in the second century, a Christian in what is now Turkey wrote an explanation of the faith to a man named Diognetus—and we’re not even certain who Diognetus was.
For all that we don’t know about it, though, we do know that it survives as a great apology for the faith, an account of what Christians believe and why. Many have thought that the Letter to Diognetus offers the single best description of what the Church should look like living in the world. It gives helpful guidance for dealing with the problem that every generation of Christ’s disciples ends up facing: i.e., how to be in the world but not of it, faithful pilgrims living in a land that is not their home.
When the Letter to Diognetus was written, paganism was strong. Christianity was new to the religious scene. Rome tended to see the young Christian cult as dangerous and disloyal. In his Annals, Tacitus, the great Roman historian and senator, described the new sect as a “destructive superstition” filled with “hatred for the human race.” Jewish communities saw Christ-followers as heretical and blasphemous, the fevered work of misguided disciples of a minor rabbi. As a result, Christians were a distrusted minority in the empire, often locked in bitter theological disputes with the Jews, who were, in many places, more numerous and better respected by the Romans.
It makes sense, then, that a Roman might want to learn more about these strange Christians—what they actually believed and did, what was true about their cult and what was malicious rumor. Diognetus’ questions seem to have hinged on the following points: Why do Christians not acknowledge the pagan deities as gods, but at the same time not practice Judaism? Why had this new way of life appeared at this juncture in history, and not before? And what was the source of the loving affection that so many Christians had for one another?
These questions in turn implied two key facts about the early Christians. First, they didn’t fit into the categories that pagan society had to offer. In a sophisticated empire comfortable with many gods (so long as they reinforced the state), their faith was somehow different. And second, this odd new religion made Christians care for one another in a tangible way that impressed those who encountered it.
If Diognetus wants to understand this new religion, our anonymous author says, he must “pack away all the old ways of looking at things that keep deceiving you. You must become like a new man from the beginning, since, as you yourself admit, you are going to listen to a really new message.” Those of us today for whom the good news is old news would do well to recall just how radical Christianity was, and always is. For a start, it rejected the whole order of pagan religion practiced by the Greeks, Romans, and many other peoples. Christians looked at statues of the gods and saw them simply as sculptures; lumps of marble, bronze, and clay. They found it ridiculous that Romans would guard them day and night, like any other valuable possession.
The author of the Letter clearly had in mind the words of Psalm 115:4–8: “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear … feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat.” Of the pagan gods, the Letter’s author writes: “Those who make [these lifeless idols] are like them; so are all who trust in them.”
Pietas (piety) was a celebrated Roman virtue, and Romans accused Christians of being atheists—not in the modern sense of believing in no gods, but rather in refusing to accept the gods that everyone else worshiped. For American Catholics, this might sound familiar. Earlier in our nation’s history we were distrusted because of our fidelity to the Pope, which many saw as unpatriotic loyalty to a foreign prince. In a robustly Protestant society, we were disdained for our rosaries and sacraments. In a post-Christian age, the alienation is of a different sort.
Today’s idols come in the shape of the human will and private appetites, wrapped in a pious refusal to judge anyone else’s behavior, the better to escape being judged oneself. As long as nobody else gets hurt, the reasoning goes, personal behavior is a matter of individual moral sovereignty. But of course, this is delusional. As every parent soon discovers, all of our personal flaws and actions ripple out to affect others, starting with the young, who have the fewest defenses.
As “rights” to disordered desires and behaviors spread, they take on the protection of law and the robes of public respectability. The more problematic the behavior, the more sacred grows the liturgy of alibis. The killing of unborn children becomes a woman’s right to choose. Marriage and family are sacrificed to the “equality” of same-sex relationships. Parents are applauded for helping their children change gender, something seen as an act of child abuse just decades ago. And as these strange things flower, the language of tolerance and diversity invariably hardens into repression against “haters”—those who hold to older biblical ideas of right and wrong.
The reason this happens is simple. No man, no society, and no nation can serve two masters. Evil cannot abide its critics. Evil does not want to be tolerated. It needs to be vindicated. It demands to be seen as right.
So it was in the second century. So it remains today. As a friend once said, “Modern man doesn’t want to be saved. He wants to be affirmed.”
* * *
CATHOLICS WHO SEEK TO live their faith seriously don’t fit in the categories secular society provides because the Gospel itself doesn’t. The Letter to Diognetus reminds us that Christian faith isn’t “an earthly discovery” or a “mortal thought” that we hand down. Rather, “it was really the Ruler of all, the Creator of all, the invisible God himself, who from heaven established the truth and the holy, incomprehensible word among men, and fixed it firmly in their hearts.”
God did this, of course, by sending that holy Word to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The divine message begins with the Incarnation. The One who made the heavens, who ordered the sun and moon, and who governs all of creation came to us not as an overwhelming ruler, but as a man. His coming shows God’s kindness and gentleness. It teaches us that God seeks to persuade us to love him, not to compel us. But because of sin, we can’t respond perfectly to that invitation. So Jesus took upon himself the burden of our sins, suffering death on the cross and rising again to new life.
The author of the Letter is eloquent in his joy: “O sweetest exchange! O unfathomable work of God! O blessings beyond all expectation! The sinfulness of many is hidden in the Righteous One, while the righteousness of the One justifies the many that are sinners. In the former time he had proved to us our nature’s inability to gain life; now he showed the Savior’s power to save even the powerless, with the intention that on both counts we should have faith in his goodness, and look on him as Nurse, Father, Teacher, Counselor, Healer, Mind, Light, Honor, Glory, Might, Life…”
These truths, the Letter argues, explain the puzzling ways that make Christians distinct. In accepting the Gospel, our author writes, “think with what joy you will be filled! Think how you will love him, who first loved you so! And when you love him, you will be an imitator of his goodness. And do not be surprised to hear that a man can become an imitator of God. He can, because God wills it.”
This faith in the saving work of Jesus Christ, combined with their love for him, drove early Christians to lives of radical charity. They loved greatly because they knew themselves to be greatly loved. The example of Jesus showed them that God is not a demanding idol, not an artifact of human fear, but the Author of self-emptying and self-sacrificing love.
This new view of God showed the early Christians that being happy did not “consist in lording it over one’s neighbors, or in longing to have some advantage over the weaker ones, or in being rich and ordering one’s inferiors about. They had a joy that others did not.” Rather, they recognized that what they had received came as a gift from God, and they saw their care for the poor as a way of imitating God who had given them so much.
This impulse to care for the poor may seem normal to us now. But as historians of the period such as Peter Brown have noted, it was utterly new to the Roman world. Even today, many people help others only because of guilt or social pressure; or they expect public authorities to do it for them; or they don’t really engage with the poor as fellow human beings at all.
But we Christians have a very particular reason for any good works we do. We can love other persons as living, unique, unrepeatable images of God’s own love, imbued with his dignity. And we can share with them the same love we’ve received ourselves. When we do this, we truly act as members of Christ’s body in the world. In the Letter’s beautiful wording: “This [Jesus] is he who was from the beginning, who appeared new and was found to be old, and is ever born young in the hearts of the saints.” Our acts of Christian love make Jesus present again in the world.
In the Letter’s most famous section, the author describes in greater detail what living in imitation of God’s love looks like. We’ll examine the section in parts to better digest the contents. First, the author writes:
For Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not use a peculiar form of speech; they do not follow an eccentric manner of life. This doctrine of theirs has not been discovered by the ingenuity or deep thought of inquisitive men, nor do they put forward a merely human teaching, as some people do. Yet, although they live in Greek and barbarian cities alike, as each man’s lot has been cast, and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of daily living, at the same time they give proof of the remarkable and admittedly extraordinary constitution of their own commonwealth. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land. They marry, like everyone else, and they beget children, but they do not cast out their offspring. They share their board with each other, but not their marriage bed. It is true that they are “in the flesh,” but they do not live “according to the flesh.” They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go far beyond what the laws require.
In a way that would be shocking to us, early Christians really were like people living in a foreign country. The spirit of their surrounding culture was alien to what they had now come to believe. But notice how they responded. They criticized their culture where it went astray, as we’ve seen in the Letter’s harsh words for idolatry. But they didn’t abandon or retire from the world. They didn’t build fortress enclaves. They didn’t manufacture their own culture or invent their own language. They took elements from the surrounding society and “baptized” them with a new spirit and a new way of living.
If a Christian who lived at the time of the Letter wanted to have an object in her home that showed her Christian faith, she’d find something with a conventional symbol that could be given a Christian interpretation. The theologian and historian Robert Louis Wilken describes how this would work: “When placed in a Christian home, a symbol which had one meaning to the Romans was invested with a Christian meaning: the dove for gentleness; the fish for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior; the shepherd for philanthropia or Christ the good shepherd. In buying and displaying objects such as lamps or rings or seals, Christians created the first Christian art (of which we have knowledge), but what the symbols represented lay in the eyes of the beholder, not in the object.” As far as Roman society was concerned, early Christianity could sometimes seem invisible.2
So again, the essential thing for the earliest Christians was not having a unique culture that communicated the faith. Rather, it was taking elements from the wider society and making them Christian. Notice, too, that they didn’t condemn pagan culture root and branch, but sought out those aspects of society they might make obedient to Christ (see 2 Cor 10:5).
Yet for all their adaptability, for all their efforts to follow the customs of their countries, something very different persisted about Christians: They knew, and deeply believed, that their primary citizenship was in heaven. They would obey earthly rulers whenever possible. But their highest loyalty belonged to the King of Kings. They would render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. But they never forgot that they themselves belonged to God. They understood that imitating Christ meant going against the grain. So, for example, the Letter notes that Christians get married and have children, just as the other citizens around them do. But they refuse to abort their children or abandon weak infants to die. They share food with one another, but they respect chastity within marriage.
Eighteen centuries ago these were the astonishing markers that set Christians apart. If today the American soul has moved away from its biblical conscience, the Letter to Diognetus reminds us that the terrain of unbelief may be new, but it’s not unfamiliar. Christianity was born in a world of abortion, infanticide, sexual confusion, and promiscuity, the abuse of power and exploitation of the poor. The early Christians’ love for Jesus compelled them to choose a more excellent way, one that made them distinct, puzzling, and sometimes contemptible in the eyes of the wider culture. Like the apostle Paul, they let their everyday life in society attract others to the Gospel (as in 1 Cor 9:22–23). But they did not conform so much that they betrayed that Gospel.
These ancient brothers and sisters in Christ are more than an interesting anecdote from history. They live vividly now in our memories as an example. We need to heed Pope Francis’s caution that the Church isn’t an NGO or a social club. The Church must be herself in order to serve and save the societies in which she lives. The Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote: “The Church must be open to the world, yes: but it must be the Church that is open to the world. The body of Christ must be this absolutely unique and pure organism if it is to become all things to all men. That is why the Church has an interior realm … so that there is something that can open and pour itself out.”3
* * *
THE CHURCH WILL ALWAYS remain a sign of contradiction, exactly like the Lord she loves and serves. Jesus warned his disciples to expect persecution. If we follow him, we shouldn’t be surprised when the world treats us as it treated him. The Letter to Diognetus gives us a picture of how the love of Jesus enabled early Christians to answer hatred with supernatural love:
They love all men, and by all men are persecuted. They are unknown, and still they are condemned; they are put to death, and yet they are brought to life. They are poor, and yet they make many rich; they are completely destitute, and yet they enjoy complete abundance. They are dishonored, and in their very dishonor are glorified; they are defamed, and are vindicated. They are reviled, and yet they bless; when they are affronted, they still pay due respect. When they do good, they are punished as evildoers; undergoing punishment, they rejoice because they are brought to life. They are treated by the Jews as foreigners and enemies, and are hunted down by the Greeks; and all the time those who hate them find it impossible to justify their enmity.
Reading passages like this, we can too easily imagine martyrdom as something from the distant past. But as we noted briefly in chapter 9, that would be very far from the truth. The twentieth century produced more martyrs than any other period in the two-thousand-year history of our faith. And today Christians are the most persecuted and harassed religious community in the world.
We live at a time when Muslim extremists destroy Christian churches and holy sites, kidnap and enslave Christian women, and publicly slaughter Christian men in many parts of Africa and the Middle East—with only modest attention from American and European news media. One event did make the headlines, though: the twenty-one Coptic Christians beheaded in 2015 by ISIS in Libya. Masked murderers cut the men’s throats on a video broadcast all over the world. The last words of some of them were “Lord Jesus Christ.”
What happened next did not make headlines. On Christian television, Beshir Kamel, the brother of two of the murdered men, thanked ISIS for not editing out the men’s last declaration of faith in Christ because it had strengthened his own faith. He then added that the families of those who were killed were “congratulating one another.” He said: “We are proud to have this number of people from our village who have become martyrs … Since the Roman era, Christians have been martyred and have learned to handle everything that comes our way. This only makes us stronger in our faith because the Bible told us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us.”
When the host asked whether he could forgive ISIS, Kamel relayed what his mother had said she would do if she saw one of the men who killed her son: “My mother, an uneducated woman in her sixties, said she would ask [him] to enter her house and ask God to open his eyes because he was the reason her son entered the kingdom of heaven.” When the host invited him to pray for his brothers’ killers, Kamel prayed, “Dear God, please open their eyes to be saved and to quit their ignorance and the wrong teachings they were taught.”4
This is what the Letter means when it says that Christians are set apart by their love. This love makes no sense apart from Jesus Christ. It shows how Christian faith can turn ordinary men and women into heroes. Christians in the Middle East offer us a powerful lesson in how to live as Jesus lived. And their suffering also challenges us to come to their aid.
The Coptic martyrs and their families offer us two lessons. First, the religious liberty that Americans take for granted is actually quite rare in the world. Even in the United States, our freedom to preach, teach, and witness our Catholic faith is only as strong as our willingness to live the faith vigorously in our own lives, and to work and fight for it in the public square. The Church has no shortage of critics eager to smother her voice and constrain her mission.
But second, we can never forget that we fight for the God of Love. We need to engage with that spirit even those who hate us. The Coptic martyrs and their families—like the early Christians—call us to claim the more excellent way. They remind us that we should bless our persecutors and pray for their conversion, that we should even be thankful for the opportunity to suffer for the sake of Christ. Only that kind of radical love can, in the end, bring victory not on the world’s terms, but the victory of genuine peace in Christ.
The next paragraph of the Letter may be the most remarkable of all:
To put it simply: What the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world. The soul, which is invisible, is kept under guard in the visible body; in the same way, Christians are recognized when they are in the world, but their religion remains unseen. The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong at their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and its members; in the same way, Christians love those who hate them. The soul is shut up in the body, and yet itself holds the body together; while Christians are restrained in the world as in a prison, and yet themselves hold the world together. The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven. The soul, when faring badly as to food and drink, grows better; so too Christians, when punished, day by day increase more and more. It is to no less a post than this that God has ordered them, and they must not try to evade it.
It’s a bold, even preposterous, statement. How could a small, disreputable sect begin to claim such a thing? Christians had no historical provenance, nothing great they could point to that might support such a claim. The only thing that could validate such a statement was this: Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. If the Resurrection happened, then that fact changes everything.
If Jesus rose from the dead, then he is all he claimed to be. As the Easter Vigil liturgy proclaims, he is the Alpha and the Omega; all time and all the ages belong to him. He creates the world and gives it its meaning. He tells the world its story. As the great French theologian Henri de Lubac wrote, “Christianity is not one of the great things of history: it is history which is one of the great things of Christianity.”5
This could be a source of inordinate pride for Christians, but it should never be so. As Benedict XVI pointed out many times, we don’t possess the truth of Christ; we are first and foremost possessed by it. Being possessed by Christ’s truth empowers us to live the Gospel with courage. Christians know that the underlying logic of the cosmos is one in which the very principle of existence is self-giving love. As one writer puts it, “Christians are a people both in and ahead of time. Christians are the people who know, and who ought to live as if they knew, that the Lord of history is in charge of history. Christians are the people who know how the story is going to turn out.”6 We know that it ends with the triumph and wedding feast of the Lamb.
Acknowledging Jesus as Lord of history means that history belongs to him. It’s his project. We should love the good in the world and work for its salvation, but the outcome isn’t finally in our hands. This means that “Christians can relax a bit about the world and its politics: not to the point of indifference or insouciance or irresponsibility, but in the firm conviction that, at the extremity of the world’s agony and at the summit of its glories, Jesus remains Lord. The primary responsibility of Christian disciples is to remain faithful to the bold proclamation of that great truth, which is the truth that the world most urgently needs to hear.”7 Or, as John Henry Newman put it, “[The Church’s task is] not to turn the whole earth into a heaven, but to bring down a heaven upon earth.”8
Christians, then, have the task of leading the world to the truth about itself. But in our time—as in the time of Diognetus—the world doesn’t want to hear it. The world hates the story Christians tell. It no longer believes in “sin.” It doesn’t understand the forgiveness of sinners. It finds the ideas of a personal God, immortality, grace, miracles, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the whole architecture of the sacraments and the “supernatural” more and more implausible. It sneers at the restraints the Gospel places on appetites and ego. And in place of the Christian narrative of history, it lowers the human horizon to a relentless now of distractions, desires, and suppressed questions about meaning.
This empty shell of a life leads in small, anesthetic steps to nihilism: In effect, the “truth” of our time in the world seems to be that there is no truth, that life has no point, and that asking the big questions is for suckers. The Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson has observed that we live in a world that has lost its story.9 Thus the Church’s task is to tell and retell the world its story, whether it claims to be interested or not.
Benedict XVI put it another way, focusing on the Eucharist. If Jesus is really present in the consecrated bread and wine, as Catholics believe, then the Eucharist is the event that is “at the center of absolutely everything. It is the event, not just of a single day, but of the history of the world as a whole, as the decisive force that then becomes the source from which changes can come. If we want the world to move forward a little, the only criterion in terms of which this can happen is God, who enters into our lives as a real presence. The Eucharist is the place where men can receive the kind of formation from which new things come into being.”10
* * *
IN ORDER FOR THE Church to pursue her mission in preaching and the Eucharist, she asks two things of the world.
The Church asks the world to open its ears and consider the possibility of its redemption. She asks the world to hear her proposal of Jesus Christ and Christ’s more excellent way. As Richard John Neuhaus wrote, “For the Catholic Christian, the world is not alien territory but a creation of love that has tragically alienated itself from its Creator. The mission of the Church is to call the world home … [We must] never tire of engaging [people], of persuading them, of pointing out in their lives the signals of the transcendent glory for which they were created. Never weary of proposing to them the true story of their lives.”11 Neuhaus also never tired of saying that the Church must make her proposal “winsomely, persuasively, and persistently, like a lover to the beloved.”12
The Church also asks the world for the freedom to be herself, for the space to live out her particular mission in word, sacrament, and charity. This requires a state that limits itself through law and custom, a state that doesn’t presume to invade all sectors of society.13 This freedom is vital not only for the Church, but also for other bodies in society that exist between the individual and the state. In the last few years, as we’ve already seen, the state has encroached on the Church’s autonomy again and again. We’ve come again to a place where the world is making it much harder for the Church to be herself.
So, what do we do? One option is to withdraw, to shake the dust from our feet and retreat to the margins. That won’t work for two reasons. First, the world will come after us. It’s not enough for an adulterer to divorce the wife he lied to, abused, and cheated on; he’d really prefer her to completely disappear. So, too, as people and cultures turn away from their former convictions, reminders of the past become both more haunting and more irritating. The Church and Christian beliefs will be resented simply because they exist, they have life, and they move faithful persons to act. And critics who attack the Church now will continue to do so more zealously.
Second, and more important, God calls us to be the soul of the world. As the Letter to Diognetus reminds us, the task to which God calls us is to hold the world together. When the world opposes Jesus Christ, we may end up being against the world. But in every such case, we’re against the world for the sake of the world. After all, God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to save it, not to condemn it. If we want to follow Jesus, we must love the world too and remain in it, as he did, to work for its salvation.
But we can never afford to be comfortable. We need to renew our minds with the Gospel (Rom 12:2), and we need places and moments in our lives to help us achieve that renewal. Places do exist where the world’s influence is diminished, where we can rest before returning to the mission. Practically speaking, this means working to renew our parishes, schools, and the small communities of which we’re a part. It means making sure that, whatever schools they attend, our children learn to live and think as Catholics.
An Eastern Orthodox writer describes this as creating “countercultural places [that] we make for ourselves, together.” This is vital for handing on the faith to our children. He continues: “If we do not form our consciences and the consciences of our children to be distinctly Christian and distinctly countercultural, even if that means some degree of intentional separation from the mainstream, we are not going to survive … The primary focus of orthodox [i.e., faithful] Christians in America should be cultural—or rather, countercultural—building the institutions and habits that will carry the faith and the faithful forward through the next Dark Age” (emphasis in original).14
This is wisdom, so long as we don’t give up on the good still present in American society. We need to create places where Catholic culture can flourish and be handed down to the next generation.15 After all, we’ve inherited a vast wealth of culture that Christians at the time of the Letter to Diognetus didn’t have. Today we Catholics do, in a sense, have our own language. Our lives are marked by a particular calendar. We feast and we fast. And of course we have the great works of Christian-inspired philosophy, theology, art, literature, music, and film. This profound Catholic culture is a blessing, and we need to recover and cultivate it. Catholic culture helps to keep our faith alive, and it marks us as different from the culture around us.
It also attracts thousands of others to the faith. Bland secular platitudes, consumer junk, and cheap nihilism feed nobody’s soul. These things strangle the heart. The grandeur and beauty of Catholic culture, even when we need to excavate it from under a mountain of mediocre religious kitsch, is the outgrowth of our worship—our cult—of Jesus Christ.16
As Robert Louis Wilken writes, “If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.”17
That’s what it means for Christians to live as the soul of the world. We certainly do need to engage in political issues, vigorously, for the sake of our society and for the liberty of the Church. But more than that, we need to build the communities, the friendships, and the places in which we joyfully live out our faith. Above all, we need to be filled with a consuming passion for Jesus Christ—that blaze of love that has lit the human heart from the second century to our own and remains unlike anything else the world has ever seen.
If we truly love God, we’ll evangelize the world he made, and whose soul he created us to be. After all, we’re disciples and friends—not just servants, but friends—of the Lord of history, who died and rose again to save the world.
The Church will endure until the end of time. We have the Word of God on that. But how and where she survives is another matter. “The question,” as one scholar suggested, “is whether her life in our time will be indifferent, fearful and corrupt, or a luminous proposal to the world of a more excellent way. The answer in our time, as so often in the past, may depend upon small communities that mirror to the world the light that came into the world, the light that has not and will never, never ever, be extinguished.”18