Month: August 2006

• Gustaf Aulen: on the paschal season

  “The Paschal season has never ceased to be the impregnable citadel of the classic idea of the atonement.” Gustaf Aulen: Christus Victor, p.133

• O.H.Mowrer on feelings as followers

  It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action. (O.H.Mowrer, quoted by Allen in GTD, 85)

• Oliver Wendell Holmes: on simplicity

  I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in GTD, 141

• The Narrative Arc of Fatherhood

  The shape of the Bible’s narrative is the shape of the father’s job; the history of salvation is the natural history of the soul. The Word of God is descriptive meta-psychology as well as prescriptive Sacred Text. The soul is not a tabula rasa born into a random vortex of spinning particles. The individual recapitulates…

• Wendell Berry: “Once you become involved in this sequence of lives, there is no way to escape the responsibility.” 

  Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet / farmer / and my favorite luddite (I don’t think he’d dispute that last): “The obligation is very great and moves two ways. The old have an obligation to be exemplary, if they can–and since nobody can be completely exemplary, they also have an obligation to be intelligent about their…