Jason Scott Montoya

“In a virtuous country, the pardon power is a way for the president to show mercy to repentant convicts. In a country as rotten as ours, it’s a license for the president to break the law with impunity.”

“Here is another way to understand the Western Void: it was Christ who once possessed us - but then we exorcised him. Now we are a Christian culture without Christ. What does this mean? Spiritually it means we are lost, wandering and vulnerable to new kinds of possession. Mythologically, it means we have no story to bind or direct us. Or rather, we think we have no story. In fact, the exorcism was incomplete. You can’t shrug off a foundational story that easily: a culture cannot survive without one. In reality, Western culture remains, at some fundamental, and even unconscious level, Christian. We are in a spiritual holding pattern, endlessly circling the airport but never landing.”

“…a spiritual void is not filled by a human collective making a rational choice to construct something called a ‘religion.’ Rather, it is possessed by an external something of much greater - and much less explicable - power.”

“…we are living in a Void: a nowhere-place. We believe in nothing at all, at least with any conviction. That’s not to say that individuals or collectives within the West do not have religious beliefs or practices - obviously they do. But there is no spiritual core to this ‘West’ as a whole, assuming it can even be said to exist anymore.”

“Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.”