Dan Pallotta

FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2005

Harry Potter and the Pope

This is too easy but it has to be said. Pope Benedict finds it necessary to condemn the Harry Potter series but does not find it necessary to say a word condemning the world's ignorance of the millions of children who die of starvation in the world every year. You can be damned sure they won't be influenced by Harry Potter. This is a classic case of doing what's easy instead of what's right. Hardly following in the footsteps of Jesus.

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THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2005

The Ideas Still to Come

In the late 1800s the head of the United States Patent Office said that, "everything that can be invented has been invented." This is a great reminder of the arrogance of the small mind. But more than that, it is cause for reflection about the domain not just of inventions, but of ideas, which are the beginning of all invention and all transformation.

We live in an age where the Magna Carta has already been written. The Declaration of Independence has already been written. Democracy fluorishes around the world. The idea of capitalism has already been tested and brought to the world. And as a result, we think that all the great ideas have already been imagined. That this is as good as the world will ever get. That there are no more big ideas to champion. They have all been foreseen by our forebearers.

To believe this is to be as foolish as the head of the Patent Office back in the 1800s. The biggest new ideas are still out there, waiting to be explored and lassoed. The world is as yet a largely untapped place. The most amazing things are possible. Our forebearers had no idea of the new ideas that were out there still to be imagined, and that they never saw. They are ours now to see and we must open our eyes to them. This will take great courage. And it is to that courage that our destiny calls us.

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WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2005

Magna Carta

I was in London last week and saw the Magna Carta at the British Library. Only four copies survived and they have two. The Magna Carta (great charter or great paper) was written in 1215 and limited the power of English Kings. Magna Carta required that the king renounce certain rights and respect certain legal procedures, and to accept that the will of the king could be bound by law. It is widely considered to be the first step in a long historical process leading to the rule of constitutional law. In short, Magna Carta was a transformation of the existing system. It opened entire new horizons. It was the precursor to other transformational documents, among them, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil Rights Act.

All of this made me wonder. For what great transformation will our generation be remembered? What great document will we write and what will it say and how will it open the world's eyes to yet an even farther horizon? To what transformation of our forebearers' transformations does our destiny call us? To what unthinkable, daring new system are we called to give birth? A world government? A magna carta of our own for the end of hunger, or war, or violence? We have no less a responsibility to challenge the system in which we live at its deepest level than they did back in 1215, and we have no less a call to greatness. The unimaginable. This is what we must imagine.

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