In alphabetical order.
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“…when a poem is said to have two meanings, both are…in the poem…the poem is their union.” Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, 45 see also Nabakov here.
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Everybody has their own list, so why not? The Beauty of the Infinite, by David Bentley Hart I lack the vocabulary to do justice to this magnificent work. See the many quotes from the book on this site…here, for example. The Ethics of Freedom, by Jacques Ellul New Seeds of Contemplation, by Thomas Merton No…
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The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you. My Bright Abyss, page 157. (Farrar, Straus,…
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‘The task is not to “believe” in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it. Perception is not projection: We are not meant to project our experience of this life into another, nor are we meant to imag- ine, by means of the details of this life (which is the only…
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In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak…
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Learning how to say you were wrong about something, and that you are sorry, is one of the most important lessons anyone can learn in his life. It is basically a question of learning how to be genuinely honest. And as such an important lesson, it is not surprising that the Narnia stories are full…
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In spite of what the Reformers did or didn’t intend, the Protestant world in fact does now have a canon-within-the-canon — let’s call it a canonlet. It is comprised of about 3 sentences from Paul which you can recite in under thirty seconds, and these perennial struggles for “the heart of the gospel” are simply…
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Make sure you read all the way to the end, to find the naughty parts: Creed by the seat of the pants, or Mairnealach’s Creed Ever since the early saints came up with the Apostle’s and Nicene creeds, various parties in the church have attempted to summarize biblical truth for various reasons. The longer history…
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“When all is said and done, ‘the gospel’ for [some preachers], and others on the theological right is that Christ made the ‘arrangement’ that can get us into heaven. In the Gospels, by contrast, ‘the gospel’ is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance…
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A Divine Conspirator – Christianity Today Magazine Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing ‘the arm of the flesh’—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way,” he says. “They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him.…
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The Apprentices – Leadership journal – ChristianityTodayLibrary.com In most churches we’re not only saved by grace, we’re paralyzed by it. We’re afraid to do anything that might be a “work.” The funny thing is we will preach to people for an hour that they can’t do anything to be saved, and then sing to them…
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There is no reason to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought. (Getting Things Done, 22)
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“There is no reason to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” (GTD, 22)
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…the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” – indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail – and cannot be truly known if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first…
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http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/beyond-disbelief-1081 In purely theoretical terms, the question of the transcendent source of reality is an ontological—not a causal—question: not how things have come to be what they are, but how it is that things exist at all. And none of the customary post-Christian attempts to make the question of being disappear can possibly succeed: even…
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I’m reading Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. When maturity is defined by a highly individualistic culture, your very development progressively disconnects you from tradition or community. So for the modern artist, the more you find your own voice the more alone you are. Many writers…
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…beauty is present only where there has been love, but only vanity where the light of love has not fallen…love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential “mood” that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it… – The Beauty of the Infinite, p 238, 240
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The distance between God and creation is not alienation, nor the Platonic chorismos or scale of being, but the original ontological act of distance by which every ontic interval subsists, given to be crossed but not overcome… The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 194
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Christian thought…desires the freedom of other stories, in part, that they might be free to be defeated. The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 442
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Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire. ************************************************** Christian theology has no stake in the myth of disinterested rationality; the church has no arguments for its faith more convincing than the form of Christ; enjoined by Christ to preach the gospel, Christians must proclaim, exhort, bear witness, persuade — before other forms of reason…
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Theology is not first a speculative science, but a hermeneutical labor… The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 32
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Hell…is the soul’s refusal to become…the expanding vessel into which the beauty of God endlessly flows. …Exile is possible within the beauty of the infinite only by way of an exilic interiority, a fictive inwardness, where the creature can grasp itself as an isolated essence. …the perfect concretization of ethical freedom, perfect justice without delight,…
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Beauty evokes desire….it is genuinely desire, and not some ideally disinterested and dispirited state of contemplation, that beauty both calls for and answers to: though not a course, impoverished desire to consume and dispose, but a desire made full at a distance, dwelling alongside what is loved and possessed in the intimacy of dispossession… …the…
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The contents of the creed do not constitute simply some system of metaphysical affirmations, but first and foremost a kind of “phenomenology of salvation”; the experience of redemption – of being joined by the Spirit to the Son and through the Son to the Father – was the ground from which the church’s doctrinal grammar…
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Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth…
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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…
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That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant…
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“Do the right thing and the right thing will happen.” – Doug Stuart
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BLOG and MABLOG For many centuries, the Church has been cultivating the bad habit of seeing this time of communion a time of introspection. But if there is anything that is a barrier to communion, it is the self-absorption that we have come to associate with this meal. So, as you come, do not curl…
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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…
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This is ostensibly about food, but read and think about parenting in general, and specifically Christian parenting of the strict sort, where it seldom is grasped that the function of the father is to GIVE. And giving that isn’t jovial (love that word) doesn’t touch the receiver as a gift. BLOG and MABLOG What…
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Douglas Wilson posts another in a series of answers to Sam Harris’ book “Letter to a Christian Nation.” First one here. BLOG and MABLOG You refer to the “obscene celebrations of violence that we find throughout the Old and New Testaments” (p. 11). You set this over against the “utter non-violence” of the Jains, which…
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If a man treats you terribly, it is all because he loves you. If a man confesses he might kill you, you should just stay with him forever and a day. If a man abandons you without explanation, it is because he loves you so much. If your lover needs to be changed, it must…
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from Douglas Wilson: BLOG and MABLOG The simplest mistake in the world is to think that an act of human kindness, extended from one person to another, is capable of being translated to the larger scale of millions of people, with everything essential in that compassionate gesture remaining unaffected and unchanged. The mistake is a…
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BLOG and MABLOG It is our custom, one that we believe to be scriptural, to practice insistent communion. That is, if you are here, and if you are baptized in the triune Name, then you must come. We insist. The Spirit and the Church together say come. We are not seeking to protect the Table…
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What could be sweeter than to have a friend with whom, as with yourself, you can discuss all that is in your heart?
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The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein Add to this his intellectual contempt for politics, which he felt took on life en masse, or in its coarsest possible form. “I consider politics, political action, all forms of politics, as inferior values and inferior activities of the mind,” he wrote. Politics is the realm…
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Ryan Hall’s Olympic Marathon Pursuit at Runner’s World.com
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“The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.”…
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This generation of evangelicals really is fatherless and adrift. They know that, they ache over it, they cannot pretend not to know it, but they have no intention of turning back to their fathers. And that means repentance has not yet been given. — Douglas Wilson, reviewing The Shack. Evangelicals have lost fatherhood, because…
TimothyOne 