Category: Commonplace_1
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Charles Taylor: “Civilization is…”
“Civilization is in a sense a matter of feeling shame in the appropriate places.” – A Secular Age, p. 142.
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David Hart: “Conceptual grammar” allows knowledge
Something can be incandescently obvious but still utterly unintelligible to us if we lack the conceptual grammar required to interpret it; and this, far from being a culpable deficiency, is usually only a matter of historical or personal circumstance. One age can see things that other ages cannot simply because it has the imaginative resources…
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David Hart: “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience…”
Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate. There is a point, that is to say, where reason and…
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Ruth Bidgood: “No need to wonder…”
No need to wonder what heron-haunted lake lay in the other valley, or regret the songs in the forest I chose not to traverse. No need to ask where other roads might have led, since they led elsewhere; for nowhere but this here and now is my true destination. The river is gentle in the…
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Jewish Proverb: “Did you enjoy my world?”
According to a traditional Jewish proverb, what God asks at the Judgement.
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Paul Elie: defines “pilgrimage”
“A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story.” from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage”, by Paul Elie. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY. 2013. page x. Simple, yet I had never seen it.
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Paul Elie, on Thomas Merton, on Conversation
“…Here was a book that achieved the kind of dialogue to which he had aspired ever since reading I and Thou: not reformulated thought, but the “spontaneous elucidation of what we do not yet know” ; not thought about what is already known, but “what will come to be known in our saying it to…
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David Bentley Hart: “…things we know before we can speak them…”
I start from the conviction that many of the most important things we know are things we know before we can speak them; indeed, we know them though with very little in the way of concepts to make them intelligible to useven as children, and see them with the greatest immediacy when we look at…
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David Bentley Hart: On whether a secular civilization is possible
All civilizations to this point have grown up around one or another sacred vision of the cosmos, which has provided a spiritual environment and a vital impulse for the arts, philosophy, law, public institutions, cultural revolutions, and so on. Whether there will ever be such a thing as a genuinely secular civilization – not a mere secular society, but a…