John Carroll
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States were a period of considerable institutional and social change, as the young republic took shape alongside the various religious communities that operated within it. John Carroll was born on January 8, 1735, in Upper Marlboro, and he lived and worked through much of that formative era as a Catholic priest, missionary, and bishop.
Carroll's education was extensive and took place across multiple institutions. He studied at the Colleges of St. Omer, Bruges, and Liège, establishments on the European continent that prepared Catholic clergy during a time when such formation was largely unavailable in the American colonies. He also received education at Stonyhurst College and at St. Mary's Seminary and University. This range of institutions gave Carroll exposure to both continental and British Catholic educational traditions. Throughout his career he worked in English and in Latin, the two languages that shaped his clerical practice.
Over the course of his life, Carroll held several distinct occupational roles within the Catholic Church. He served as a Catholic priest, a Catholic missionary, and a Catholic bishop, and also functioned as a regular cleric. These roles together reflect the pastoral and institutional dimensions of his engagement with the Church during a period when Catholicism in the United States was still organizing itself. His formation across European institutions informed the work he carried out as a citizen of the United States.
Carroll died on December 3, 1815, in Baltimore. The concrete record of his life rests on the occupations he held — priest, missionary, bishop, regular cleric — and on the educational path that took him from Upper Marlboro to institutions across continental Europe and Britain before returning him to work in the United States. His use of both English and Latin throughout his ministry reflects the dual demands placed on Catholic clergy of his era.
Quotes by John Carroll
John Carroll's insights on:
Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. ... The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.
In so far as the intention of education is to train the child for a vocation it is a millstone around his neck.
For Stirner, the social axiom of conservative, liberal, and socialist schools of political thought alike is in itself repressive: it disguises as potentially redemptive an order whose central function is inhibitory of the individual's interests.
For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.
Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions.
Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the 'last man' he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.
Nietzsche ... combines, in effect, Christ's harsh sayings: 'let the dead bury their dead' and 'narrow is the way which leadeth unto life'.
The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.
Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.