Every once in a while, I truly covet my neighbor’s idea. That happened yesterday afternoon, when I learned that this piece by my friend Mike Aquilina was soon to be posted on the First Things website: He compares the faithful joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen.

Different styles. Same Source.  

Neither Dolly nor Sheen led with hostility. They seemed to assume that the person on the other side of the TV screen was capable of recognizing goodness, beauty, humor, and truth. They spoke to that capacity.  This didn’t require them to surrender their convictions. Dolly’s songs inhabited a moral universe in which promises mattered, betrayal wounded, poverty had dignity, sacrifice could redeem suffering, and death did not have the final word. She could welcome people whose lives and views differed sharply from her own without pretending that differences didn’t exist.  Sheen could be even more demanding. He spoke about judgment, repentance, sexual morality, and the totalitarian temptations of the modern age. He wore on his sleeve, as it were, the markings of the most dogmatically demanding religion. Yet few viewers felt that he despised them. His criticisms of modern life were delivered by a man visibly delighted to be alive—in his native country and in his own day and age.  That delight makes the difference. Christian truth appeared in Dolly and Sheen not as a burden reluctantly shouldered but as a source of creative energy. They were funny because they were free. They were generous because they believed........

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