By Thomas Creen, MJ • Phoenix, AZ
Miles Jesu has inherited much of its formation from the Cursillo Movement because all our first members were Cursillistas. Many of our current members are Cursillistas, too.
One maxim which Miles Jesu adopted from the Cursillo is, “Don’t read good books…read the best books.” Life is short, and there is so much good material that we need to study that there is no time to read good books, only enough for the best books, both secular and religious.
I broke that rule recently. It was a painful lesson. Because of my love for philosophy and my respect for some of the excellent insights made by Ayn Rand in a few articles of hers which I had read, I decided to read her novel Atlas Shrugged. It was horrible. The writing was bad, the story was unappealing, and the main message of the book was questionable at best. It has some elements of truth in it but a lot of garbage mixed in. It was tough to keep reading it, but I forced myself to finish it. At the very least, by reading it I became more familiar with the thought of a very influential modern philosopher. But it still wasn’t the best use of my time.
On the other hand, over summer vacation it dawned on me that there were so many classic, secular works that I had never read and should. (Most of them had been assigned to read when I was in school which was why I never read them.) So I read some Shakespeare (hated it), A Tale of Two Cities (no wonder it’s a classic), and am now starting The Brothers Karamazov (even though someone messed up the translation of the title from Russian. It should be “The Karamazov Brothers”. Oh, well. It’s had some success regardless.) So no more good books for me, only the best.
This post is also available in:
Hindi 
Italian 
Polish 
Slovak 
Spanish 
Ukrainian
