Category: Commonplace_1
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David Allen: “…the same thought twice…”
“There is no reason to have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought.” (GTD, 22)
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Annie Dillard: “…the sleeping god may wake some day…”
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their…
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Theodore Dalrymple: The False Apology Syndrome
The habit of public apology for things for which one bears no personal responsibility changes the whole concept of a virtuous person, from one who exercises the discipline of virtue to one who expresses correct sentiment. The most virtuous person of all is he who expresses it loudest and to most people. This is a…
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David Bentley Hart: “…actus essendi subsistens…”
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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Charles Murray: “…to make observed human nature compatible with theoretical schemes…”
But what is it that we have learned that is truly new about human nature in the 20th century? I submit that the body of even the best work consists overwhelmingly of commentary on insights first expressed centuries ago. Indeed, if I were to characterize the role of the behavioral sciences in the 20th century—and…
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Flannery O’Connor: “…stifled with all deliberate speed…”
“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. …Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing for writing, because they think they are…
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Flannery O’Connor: “…the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.”
“From my own experience in trying to make stories “work”, I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the…
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Flannery O’Connor: “…too stupid to enter the past…”
“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning…our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. “ Flannery O’Connor, Total Effect and the Eighth Grade
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Flannery O’Connor: “the Price of Restoration”
“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of…
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Eugene Peterson: “…God is doing something before I know it.”
“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.”…