January 2012
16 posts
“God, that madest earth and Heaven,
Darkness and light;
Who the day for toil...”
– Suggestion: This old hymn makes a good bedtime prayer.
This week I taught an intensive class in Christian theology. All day long. 5 days in a row.
Going in to teach, I thought I had it rough.
One of my students had it rougher. His name is Tom and he is legally blind. He has partial vision in one eye, and uses a special device to read the copies of my lecture notes I printed out for him. The scanner blew every word up to about a million-point font on...
“Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley’s wall with...”
– David Foster Wallace, “Octet” (via on dfw)
We need more philosophers and theologians who engage in “indirect communication.”
“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,...”
– - Shakespeare, As You Like It
This is helpful to say to yourself in tough times, probably a bad idea to say to others.
“[C]heap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance,...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s response to that rapping guy who hates the church - from The Cost of Discipleship.
“You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes...”
– Athanasius, On the Incarnation
In §13-14 Athanasius’s theological argument seems informed, fundamentally, not by divine justice, or abstract agape, but by a yearning for a particular “thou.” Even his kingly metaphors are all centered on the king’s loving attachment to...
The present importance of the Book of Job cannot be expressed adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting of ancient books. We may almost say of the Book of Job that it is the most interesting of modern books. In truth, of course, neither of the two phrases covers the matter, because fundamental human religion and fundamental human irreligion are both at once old and new; philosophy...
“St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
“Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by...”
– Pascal, Pensee 233, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pascal’s Pensées, by Blaise Pascal.
“In order to attack it, they should have protested that they had made every...”
– Pascal, Pensee 194 http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees.txt
“The Song helps us relearn what nearly every civilization before ours already...”
– Peter Leithart, The Poetry of Sex | First Things
“This is why the loss of religious certainty facilitated the birth of kitsch....”
– Kitsch and the Modern Predicament by Roger Scruton, City Journal Winter 1999
“Kitsch is pretense. But not all pretense is kitsch. Something else is needed to...”
– Kitsch and the Modern Predicament by Roger Scruton, City Journal Winter 1999
“The world of kitsch is a world of make-believe, of permanent childhood, in which...”
– Kitsch and the Modern Predicament by Roger Scruton, City Journal Winter 1999
“Wright on the Virgin Birth:
We would have to suppose that, within the first...”
– Suspending scepticism: History and the Virgin Birth – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) 