Category: My Commonplace Book

• Tony Esolen: “All Flattened Things Are Equal”

  Touchstone Magazine – Mere Comments: All Flattened Things are Equal All Flattened Things are Equal…how can Christians fail to see that equality and hierarchy are not necessarily contradictory, seeing that they have the examples of the obedience of the Son to the Father, and of the inner life of the Trinity itself? Which brings me…

• Unknown: To Replace A Lightbulb

  I stole this from somewhere. During a Eucharistic Congress, a number of priests from different orders are gathered in a church for Vespers. While they are praying, a fuse blows and all the lights go out. The Benedictines continue praying from memory, without missing a beat. The Jesuits begin to discuss whether the blown fuse…

• Masai Creed: “The Hyenas Did Not Touch Him”

    From an article titled “Delighted by Doctrine” in  Christianity Today Magazine.  The link is long dead.   As a capstone to his lifelong interest in the central texts of the Christian faith, [Jaroslav] Pelikan edited (with Valerie Hotchkiss) what could only be called a second magnum opus—Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition,…

• Dallas Willard: Paralyzed by grace

  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 for a half an hour trying to…

• Dallas Willard: Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today

  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.…

• On Christians Arguing Online: “…the war-mongering matrix of apologetics.”

  I found this on the internet many years ago. I no longer know who wrote it. I hereby openly repudiate the entire mode of discourse… the fundamentally adversarial mode and its entrenched negative intellectual and social orientation. I deny that truly constructive, properly Christian discourse with other Christians, and chiefly between Catholics and Protestants, can…

• Peter Leithart: Modernity as Ingratitude

  The writer Peter Leithart: “…modern philosophy arises from a rejection of tradition. Modern philosophy is a tradition of the rejection of traditions, or as Gadamer put it, a prejudice against prejudices. Seen from the perspective of Heidegger’s Pietist slogan, modern philosophy arises from a refusal to receive. Descartes sitting in his German room in front…

• W. H. Auden: “Friday’s Child”

  (In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945) He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— “Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort On those too bumptious to repent.” Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what…

• Goethe on assimilating Tradition

  “What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.” Tradition is what you inherit; dead tradition is what you fail to win for yourself.

• Alan Jacobs: that dialogue is between persons, not words on a page

  Goodbye, Blog – Books & Culture I find myself meditating on a passage from a book by C. S. Lewis. In his great work of literary history, Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century, Lewis devotes a passage to what he describes, with a certain savageness, as “that whole tragic farce which we call the…