Jeff Culbreath on Opinion and Conviction
From his latest SATURDAY EVENING post:

In a democracy, everyone is supposed to have an opinion on everything. And everyone does, it seems - or if they don't, they're ready to form one instantly. When I was eighteen, I had an opinion on the minimum wage. Today, at age thirty-nine and with a bachelor's degree in economics under my belt, I have no opinion on the minimum wage. Like most Americans, I went about things backwards. I formed all kinds of opinions on things I knew nothing about very early in life - and now I face the uncomfortable task of having to renounce many of these. 

The world, of course, confuses opinion with conviction. We Catholics must hold the revealed truths of the Faith (and their many corollaries) with unwavering ferocity. Yet the world isn't going to cooperate: we're expected to be indifferentists when it comes to religion but fierce partisans when it comes to sports or economics or SUVs. T.S. Eliot was right when he said "The world is soft where the Church is hard, and the world is hard where the Church is soft."

I, too, face the same uncomfortable task. Mr. Culbreath and I discussed this topic when we met for breakfast a week ago in Chico, CA. It seems that we Americans, as radical democrats, have this propensity more than others.