Category: Commonplace_1
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Czeslaw Milosz: “Gift”
Gift A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did…
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Denise Levertov: “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”
It’s when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart: not to a flower, not to a dolphin, to no innocent form but to this creature vainly sure it and no other…
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John Milton: “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity by John Milton I This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King, Of wedded maid and Virgin Mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That he our deadly forfeit should release,…
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Christina Rossetti: In the Bleak Midwinter
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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David Bentley Hart: “Suffering has no intrinsic meaning at all…”
This, from a book review, “…suffering and death…have no intrinsic meaning at all…” Sage – Faith and Theology Faith and Theology: Explaining evil? David Bentley Hart’s little book on theodicy, The Doors of the Sea (2005), is a work of profound insight. Hart observes that attempts to justify evil by appealing to its broader meaning…
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Doug Wilson, on Eucharist: “…do not close your eyes…”
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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Peter Leithart: Modesty – the Awareness that Knowledge has a Time.
Leithart.com | Liturgical Thinking The destruction of time meant the destruction of shame and modesty: “Shame is the soul’s garment against arbitrary and untimely knowledge: because timing is the condition in which alone the eternal may be revealed.” It takes time for a bride to know her lover, and modesty is the veil over that…
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Alister McGrath on Dawkins: “an embarassment to atheists”.
The Kindlings Muse » Guest Blog: ALISTER McGRATH. “Do stop behaving as if you are God, Professor Dawkins.” Dawkins, Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, is on a crusade. His salvo of outrage and ridicule is meant to rid the world of its greatest evil: religion. “If this book works as I…
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C.S. Lewis: “…my desire for Paradise…”
..[W]e remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove…
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Doug Wilson: Bland Leading the Bland
Bland Leading the Bland “The churches today are effeminate because effeminate men with wireless mikes and cardigan sweaters stroll around a platform chatting with the congregants in a nonthreatening and relational way. The churches are leaderless because we are nervous about prophetic preaching, and settle instead for bland and balanced leadership teams. The churches have…