Humanly Optimistic Answers...

...looking to solve the lack of fully human integration in the world today work to initiate a purely secular and fragmented solution to human development. These marshal immense resources of political power to maintain established patterns, which benefit those who know best how to profit from them. Many Christians are justifying renouncing their sense of spiritual privilege in solidarity with these secular hopes. Others - the majority - are lining up with these Western principalities under the mistaken notion that Christ is aligned with them. But neither of these are truly Christian solutions; neither is able to offer any kind of genuine life-integration that is found in the simple, immediate experience of God that comes with contemplative living. Each of these fraudulent solutions are reducible to identification with one form of enculturation or another. These are merely particularized, historical solutions, and in every way bring judgment upon the organized church, which promotes these, and which itself has become merely another principality within a principality.

- Thomas Merton (ed., para.), 1966