Month: August 2006

• On Christians Arguing Online: “…the war-mongering matrix of apologetics.”

  I found this on the internet many years ago. I no longer know who wrote it. I hereby openly repudiate the entire mode of discourse… the fundamentally adversarial mode and its entrenched negative intellectual and social orientation. I deny that truly constructive, properly Christian discourse with other Christians, and chiefly between Catholics and Protestants, can…

• Gratitude to impersonal forces?

    In the presence of largesse, there are often accomplished mental convolutions,  just to avoid thanking anyone.   We seem to have an inherent need to give thanks, not only to other humans, but to something or someone larger.   But after modernity, no God is available.   So…thank impersonal objects? A common trope of…

• Peter Leithart: Modernity as Ingratitude

  The writer Peter Leithart: “…modern philosophy arises from a rejection of tradition. Modern philosophy is a tradition of the rejection of traditions, or as Gadamer put it, a prejudice against prejudices. Seen from the perspective of Heidegger’s Pietist slogan, modern philosophy arises from a refusal to receive. Descartes sitting in his German room in front…

• W. H. Auden: “Friday’s Child”

  (In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945) He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what…

• Goethe on assimilating Tradition

  “What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.” Tradition is what you inherit; dead tradition is what you fail to win for yourself.

• Alan Jacobs: that dialogue is between persons, not words on a page

  Goodbye, Blog – Books & Culture I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as “that whole tragic farce which we call the…

• Worship Wars, part 357,899,543

  Now that we’ve spent, oh, 30 years on this, let’s see if we can sum it up: All living things retain the old, and add the new. So, let’s do both. Retain the old, add the new. Tradition is good, except when it doesn’t work. There is no reason to throw out the old because…

• Douglas Wilson: Worship as political strategy

  BLOG and MABLOG So we don’t have a political agenda, but we do have an agenda for politics. But the secularists don’t need to worry about us at all. For if Jesus is not Lord (as they claim) our means of extending His rule and reign (through worship) will be impotent in the extreme. But…

• John Howard Yoder on patience in faithfulness

  The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and the other kinds of power in every human conflict;…

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “…a new type of monasticism…”

  The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience – and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any…