{"id":1704,"date":"2016-01-05T19:18:20","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T23:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1704"},"modified":"2016-01-05T19:20:54","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T23:20:54","slug":"courage-a-case-for-local-independent-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1704","title":{"rendered":"Courage: A Case for Local, Independent Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thomas_Aquinas_in_Stained_Glass\"There are high-tech adventures in theaters to strengthen one\u2019s New Year\u2019s resolve. \u00a0Many of them have the word \u201ccourage\u201d in the description. \u00a0I recommend <\/span>Spotlight<\/span><\/i>. \u00a0It is the most encouraging movie I have seen in forever. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thomas Aquinas offers a helpful description of courage. \u00a0This thirteenth-century writer is the authoritative theologian for the Roman Catholic Church. \u00a0I have learned tricks over years of trying to entice Protestant students to read him. \u00a0The section of his classic <\/span>Summa Theologiae<\/span><\/i> that hooks students is on virtues and vices. \u00a0No one parses the fine distinctions between, for example, jealousy and backbiting, or anger and spite, or temperance and insensibility like Thomas Aquinas. \u00a0It only takes a few years in a real congregation with actual people to note the almost infinite variety of vice and virtue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thomas continues in a tradition to treat fortitude (courage) as one of the four basic or \u201ccardinal\u201d virtues. \u00a0Along with practical wisdom, temperance, and justice, courage is one of four habits of being that orient a person to understand who and where they are, and how their corner of the world fares in relation to the pivotal aspects of life that make life good. \u00a0To understand what Thomas means by the cardinal, or orienting, virtues, think of the opposite: an intentionally disorienting story. \u00a0Some writers try intentionally to disorient people, for laughs, or to make life appear utterly random. \u00a0Such writing can make you temporarily unable to regain your balance. \u00a0Courage is one of four virtues that may allow a person to regain her bearings. \u00a0Courage is often necessary to determine what is just, or practical, or temperate, particularly when people with power around you are impractical, intemperate, or unjust. \u00a0Thomas further explains that each of the four cardinal virtues balance between two excesses. \u00a0Courage is a habit of being between foolhardiness, on the one hand, and, on the other, living fearfully. \u00a0Sometimes a person has to cultivate courage in order to point out what is nonsensical. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Or to point out what is obscene. \u00a0The word obscene names something so disorienting that it assaults your senses, rendering you senseless. \u00a0Here is one local example. \u00a0Several years ago this newspaper ran an article on how some executives at Duke University had given themselves large bonuses during a period when supposedly everyone at the university needed to \u201ctighten our belts\u201d and do with less. \u00a0While librarians and surgeons and nurses and teachers were doing much more with much less, some higher-ups received giant gold checks. \u00a0The week the story broke, one distinguished colleague saw me in our office hallway in a tiara and black velvet dress. \u00a0He asked me what in the world I was doing. \u00a0I told him I was on my way to perform street theater to draw attention to the scandal. \u00a0He shook his head and said, \u201cIt really is obscene.\u201d \u00a0He did not go on record, but I used his word \u201cobscene\u201d repeatedly in public to characterize the mess. \u00a0The most courageous thing I have done ever was declare publicly that my marriage was untenable. \u00a0The most brazen thing I have done ever was participate in a group effort to whistle-blow, at my employer, wearing a tiara. But we would not even have had a whistle to blow without old-fashioned, journalistic muckraking. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In his description of courage, Thomas Aquinas thinks through how courage intertwines with endurance. \u00a0<\/span>Spotlight <\/span><\/i>relates with similar attention to detail the actual story about a team of journalists with the <\/span>Boston Globe<\/span><\/i> who together discover the courageous patience sufficient to trace a pattern of disorienting deceit. \u00a0Boston clergy, lawyers and other public figures sustained a meticulously crafted, multi-faceted cover-up of the fact that at least a thousand children had been sexually violated by over a hundred church leaders in the Boston area alone. \u00a0The film depicts the slow, steady, journalistic tenacity necessary for raking up such stealthily buried muck. \u00a0The film also shows how a brilliantly lying set of liars can hone the subtle skills of manipulation and intimidation. \u00a0Each journalist in the story has to develop the courage both to note subtly delivered threats and to continue, even while noting the power behind these threats, the mundane but heroic tasks to expose truth. \u00a0An important part of the film is how Boston is a \u201csmall town,\u201d and how a key, regional institution may develop a shield of amoral invisibility. \u00a0\u201cThe Church\u201d had become a given, an indisputable \u201cGood,\u201d capital G, both uniting and silencing people. \u00a0<\/span>Spotlight<\/span><\/i> is in this way a real story comparable to Henrik Ibsen\u2019s 1882 play \u201cAn Enemy of the People.\u201d \u00a0Ibsen also relates the stakes of telling the truth in a town living a lie. \u00a0Both stories vividly show why courageously independent, local journalism is vital for living well. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are high-tech adventures in theaters to strengthen one\u2019s New Year\u2019s resolve. \u00a0Many of them have the word \u201ccourage\u201d in the description. \u00a0I recommend Spotlight. \u00a0It is the most encouraging movie I have seen in forever. \u00a0 Thomas Aquinas offers a helpful description of courage. \u00a0This thirteenth-century writer is the authoritative theologian for the Roman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,101],"tags":[22,198,199],"class_list":["post-1704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-theology-2","tag-aquinas","tag-journalism","tag-spotlight"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-ru","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1704"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1706,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1704\/revisions\/1706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}