Meaning as Moral Identity

“This is meaning as moral identity, something I acquire by being born into a specific community with a distinctive history, when I recognise a duty of loyalty to a past and responsibility for a future by living faith and handing it on to those who come after me. It is what Edmund Burke thought society was: ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. It is not meaning discovered or meaning invented, but meaning collectively made and renewed in the conscious presence of God – that is to say, an authority beyond ourselves and our merely human devices and desires.”

The Great Partnership, Chapter 10, p. 171