Author: Tim

• The White Stone

  Adam named Eve when she was found to be a companion just for him. Mary’s eyes were opened to the Resurrected Christ when He called her by name: “Mary!” Religious conversions of all kinds prompt the adoption of a new name to go along with the new identity. Saul becomes Paul, Simon becomes Peter, and…

• Meaning

  Either Start With a Person Or Do Without Them “Meaning” is our word for whatever from the future is sensed in the present. Or, said differently, whatever promises to outlive us. Nothing that has a visible end feels meaningful. Why are we so desperate to send somethng into the future? A son, a poem, a…

• “Pneuma” Became “Nous”

  Sometime around Constantine the Christian writers on the spiritual life adopted Greek Terminology to describe spiritual events, and in the process imbibed Greek metaphysics and corrupted native biblical anthropology. For example, “Nous” was substituted for the NT “pneuma”, because the nous, in late Greek anthropology, was the seat of the soul and the noblest part…

• Vladimir Lossky: “…an intellectual discipline of the non-opposition of opposites…”

  “…the dialectic which governs the game of negations and affirmations. One can define it as an intellectual discipline of the non-opposition of opposites…” p. 26, In the Image and Likeness of God.Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985. To which someone might well add this: “Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t…

• Shakespeare: on keeping promises

  “He was ever precise in promise-keeping.” William Shakespeare. Measure for Measure, Scene 2 (From the text of Clark and Wright.)

• 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…