Category: My Commonplace Book

• John V. Taylor: Poem…“Over the swinging parapet…”

  Over the swinging parapet of my arm your sentinel eyes lean gazing. Hugely alert on the pale unfinished clay of your infant face, they drink light from this candle on the tree. Drinking, not pondering, each bright thing you see, you make it yours without analysis and, stopping down the aperture of thought to a…

• Ann Lewin, poem on prayer

  Prayer is like watching for the Kingfisher. All you can do is Be there where he is likely to appear, and Wait. Often, nothing much happens; There is space, silence, and expectancy. No visible sign, only the Knowledge that he’s been there, And may come again. Seeing or not seeing cease to matter, You have…

• Walter Breuggemann: On Land As Inheritance

  Moses understands, as do the prophets after him, that being in the land poses for Israel a conflict between two economic systems, each of which views the land differently. On the one hand, the land is regarded as property and possession to be bought and sold and traded and used. On the other hand, in…

• Walter Breuggemann: “God-making”

  “God-making” amid anxiety is a standard human procedure!” – Walter Breuggemann, in Sabbath As Resistance

• Walter Brueggemann: “Prosperity breeds amnesia”

  “Prosperity breeds amnesia.” – Walter Brueggemann, in Sabbath As Resistance

• Wendell Berry: “The Peace Of Wild Things”

  

• Charles Taylor: St. Francis and the Particular

  “So it is not altogether surprising that this attempt to bring Christ to the world, the lay world, the previously unhallowed world, should inspire a new focus on this world. On one side, this involved a new vision of nature, as we see in the rich Franciscan spirituality of the life of God in the…

• Gratia Non Tollit Naturam Sed Perficit

  “Grace perfects nature rather than destroying it.”

• Charles Taylor: “Civilization is…”

  “Civilization is in a sense a matter of feeling shame in the appropriate places.” – A Secular Age, p. 142.

• 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…