Category: Theology
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Gratitude to impersonal forces?
In the presence of largesse, there are often accomplished mental convolutions, just to avoid thanking anyone. We seem to have an inherent need to give thanks, not only to other humans, but to something or someone larger. But after modernity, no God is available. So…thank impersonal objects? A common trope of…
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Worship Wars, part 357,899,543
Now that we’ve spent, oh, 30 years on this, let’s see if we can sum it up: All living things retain the old, and add the new. So, let’s do both. Retain the old, add the new. Tradition is good, except when it doesn’t work. There is no reason to throw out the old because…
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The White Stone
Adam named Eve when she was found to be a companion just for him. Mary’s eyes were opened to the Resurrected Christ when He called her by name: “Mary!” Religious conversions of all kinds prompt the adoption of a new name to go along with the new identity. Saul becomes Paul, Simon becomes Peter, and…
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Meaning
“Meaning” is our word for whatever from the future is sensed in the present. Or, said differently, whatever promises to outlive us. Nothing that has a visible end feels meaningful. The language of zen was a fortunate discovery for the materialist mind. It gives him an attitude and some phrases for those moments when he…
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David Hart: “Beauty evokes desire”
Beauty evokes desire….it is genuinely desire, and not some ideally disinterested and dispirited state of contemplation, that beauty both calls for and answers to: though not a course, impoverished desire to consume and dispose, but a desire made full at a distance, dwelling alongside what is loved and possessed in the intimacy of dispossession… …the…
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David Hart: Delight As A Mode Of Knowledge
Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth…
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It Takes Three, Actually (outline)
Equality is not a relationship. The word implies that two things have the same relationship to a third thing, but they may have no necessary relationship with each other. If two people are equal before a common entity, and that is the extent of their commonality, they in fact have no relationship. Since equality has…
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Start With a Person Or Do Without Them
“In the Beginning God..”Something must be postulated. This is not a “proof” of God’s existence (there can be no such thing) but is simply a feature of our minds, which implies God’s existence. Our minds are such that something must be postulated. This initial postulate can be matter only, of course, but that requires that…
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Anger’s Entire Function is to Enact Justice
Injustice or unfairness, real or perceived, makes us mad. It is a precognitive force, discovered within us at some point in those moments after the Fall when we were rearranging all our internal powers to make sure we were dealt with fairly…. just after that bliss when “fair” was an unknown concept. Fish don’t know…