Category: Commonplace_1
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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.
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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…
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Douglas Wilson: Worship as political strategy
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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John Howard Yoder on patience in faithfulness
The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and the other kinds of power in every human conflict;…
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “…a new type of monasticism…”
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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“THEORY” From “The Scheme of Things” by Allen Wheelis
Note: Wheelis wrote an interesting little book called “How People Change”. I don’t share his apparent rejection of the Christian faith, of course, but he is an honest and thoughtful writer, as this excerpt of another of his books shows. Be patient, the first paragraph is the slowest. I have yet to conceive the relation…
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Joseph Epstein: on reading
The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein One of the keenest pleasures of reading derives from being in the close company of someone more thoughtful than you but whose thoughts, owing to the courtesy of clarity, are handsomely accessible to you.
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Epstein on Valery on politics: politics gets a portion of the contempt it deserves
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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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…
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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.)