Little Kings & Local Affinities
Louis R. Tarsitano on Identity Politics & the Christian
The all-sufficient question for most intellectuals, asked in splendid existential isolation, is: Who am I? They answer this question, along with their fellow members of the planning class, as if from a burning bush: “I am who I am.” The world, then, is only a stage for the self-expression of an identity rooted only in themselves.
In contrast, ordinary people ask at least one other question: What am I? They identify themselves by the blood and the land and the culture that produced them. Life for them has a more subtle texture than can be adequately described by an abstract appeal to “humankind” and to “spaceship earth.” They not only need, they also demand roots in something besides themselves, and the deeper the better.
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Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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