True indifference

     "False indifference is the scourge of a domesticated Christianity, tired and worn-out, readily accommodating itself to its culture, bowing to the social pressures of the status quo.  It remains so tame as to fear nothing so much as the disdain of sophisticated unbelief."

     Belden C. Lane, "Desert attentiveness, desert indifference:  countercultural spirituality in the desert fathers and mothers," Cross currents 44, no. 2 (Summer 1995):  201 (193-206).  Lane might take this in one direction, but I would add another.

"the Father, the Father's Name, and the Father's Kingdom"

"the words of the [Lord’s] prayer point out the Father, the Father’s name, and the Father’s kingdom to help us learn from the source himself to honor, to invoke, and to adore the one Trinity.  For the name of God the Father who subsists essentially is the only-begotten Son, and the kingdom of God the Father who subsists essentially is the Holy Spirit.  Indeed, what Matthew here calls the kingdom another evangelist elsewhere calls Holy Spirit:  'May your Holy Spirit come and purify us.'"

     Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father, First Petition.  Maximus Confessor:  selected writings, trans. George C. Berthold, Classics of Western spirituality (New York:  Paulist Press, 1985), 106.  The quotation is from the famous variant on the Lord’s Prayer in Luke, ἐλθέτω τὸ πνεῦμά σου τὸ ἅγιον (ἐφ' ἡμᾶς) καὶ καθαρισάτω ἡμας.

"We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our laws and liberties; but if not, not."

Antonio Pérez, 1534-1611

"Nos, que valemos tanto como vos os hazemos nuestro Rey, y Señor, con tal que nos guardeys nuestros fueros, y libertades, y syno, No."

     The oath of the Aragonese in the famous (Antonio Pérez-ian) version of 1593, as reproduced on p. 25 of Ralph E. Giesey, If not, not:  the Oathe of the Aragonese and the legendary laws of Sobrarbe (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1968).  "For the Aragonese, says Pérez [in 1593], this was 'the ancient manner of swearing to their King.'"  Translation from Neal Ascherson, "The value of independence," The New York review of books 66, no. 7 (April 18, 2019:  34 (33-36).  For alternative versions of the oath printed in some cases earlier, see Giesey, pp. 18 ff.  From leaf (?) 92 of the 1596 printing of the Relaciones by Pérez:

"why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them"

     "If heretics no longer horrify us today, as they once did our forefathers, is it certain that it is because there is more charity in our hearts?  Or would it not too often be, perhaps, without our daring to say so, because the bone of contention, that is to say, the very substance of our faith, no longer interests us?  Men of too familiar and too passive a faith, perhaps for us dogmas are no longer the Mystery on which we live, the Mystery which is to be accomplished in us.  Consequently, then, heresy no longer shocks us; at least, it no longer convulses us like something trying to tear the soul of our souls away from us. . . . And that is why we have no trouble in being kind to heretics, and no repugnance in rubbing shoulders with them.
     "In reality, bias against 'heretics' is felt today just as it used to be.  Many give way to it as much as their forefathers used to do.  Only, they have turned it against political adversaries.  Those are the only ones that horrify them.  Those are the only ones with whom they refuse to mix.  Sectarianism has only changed its object and taken other forms, because the vital interest has shifted.  Should we dare to say that this shifting is progress?
     "It is not always charity, alas, which has grown greater, or which has become more enlightened:  it is often faith, the taste for the things of eternity, which has grown less."

     Henri de Lubac, S.J., Further paradoxes, trans. from Nouveaux paradoxes (1955) by Ernest Beaumont (London:  Longmans, Green; Westminster, MD:  The Newman Press, 1958), 118-119.
     That last paragraph continues and concludes with the words:  "Injustice and violence are still reigning; but they are now in the service of degraded passions."  So were our "forefathers" who "refuse[d] to mix" with heretics, then, guilty of "bias", "Injustice and violence"?  Is that how, contra some, this passage should really be read?  Or is the conservative reading correct after all, since the "passions" of our "forefathers" were apparently not then "degraded"?  I have made no attempt to read around this in context, and am no expert on de Lubac, who, I believe, suffered himself from some censure, and could therefore be saying something somewhat more nuanced here.

"a technology is not simply a technique that may be employed for good or ill"

"a technology is not simply a technique that may be employed for good or ill but bears within itself a value system and a worldview—perhaps even a metaphysics and a theology."  Somewhat like art, which is "explicit" about this, "its [implicit] purpose is to be the bearer of a message and a meaning."

     Stratford Caldecott, "New sins:  technology and the frontiers of Catholic social teaching," Communio:  international Catholic review 28, no. 3 (Fall 2001):  9 (1-17).

"What John Paul II has done with . . . his establishment of the John Paul II Institute, with its branches in every continent, cannot now be undone."

     Stratford Caldecott, "New sins:  technology and the frontiers of Catholic social teaching," Communio:  international Catholic review 28, no. 3 (Fall 2001):  8 (1-17).

"technology is never merely technology. It reveals man and his aspirations"

"Technology — it is worth emphasizing — is a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man. In technology we express and confirm the hegemony of the spirit over matter. 'The human spirit, "increasingly free of its bondage to creatures, can be more easily drawn to the worship and contemplation of the Creator"'. Technology enables us to exercise dominion over matter, to reduce risks, to save labour, to improve our conditions of life. It touches the heart of the vocation of human labour: in technology, seen as the product of his genius, man recognizes himself and forges his own humanity. Technology is the objective side of human action whose origin and raison d'etre is found in the subjective element: the worker himself. For this reason, technology is never merely technology. It reveals man and his aspirations [(technica ars numquam est tantummodo technica ars. Hominem ipsa ostendit eiusque . . . proclivitatem)] towards development [(ad progressionem)], it expresses the inner tension that impels him gradually to overcome material limitations. Technology, in this sense, is a response to God's command to till and to keep the land (cf. Gen 2:15) that he has entrusted to humanity, and it must serve to reinforce the covenant between human beings and the environment, a covenant that should mirror God's creative love."

But "technology can [also] be understood as a manifestation of absolute freedom, the freedom that seeks to prescind from the limits inherent in things. The process of globalization could replace ideologies with technology, allowing the latter to become an ideological power that threatens to confine us within an a priori that holds us back from encountering being and truth. Were that to happen, we would all know, evaluate and make decisions about our life situations from within a technocratic cultural perspective to which we would belong structurally, without ever being able to discover a meaning that is not of our own making."

     Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate (29 June 2009), part 6, secs. 69-70.  But as the Latin makes clear, these "aspirations" are but a single "proclivity," and that towards progress.  So the But of secs. 70 and following has to do with a potential corruption of that rooted in the desire for "absolute freedom".