writing in the dust

“… the history of Christian theology within any culture can always be read as a sustained effort to dislocate that culture’s ‘common sense’.”

— Robert Jenson

“A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.”

— Walter Benjamin

“The mysteries of the world are of such a kind that some day they can cease to be mysteries. God is always a mystery.”

— Barth

“We should be inhuman where God is human, we should be ashamed of Jesus Christ Himself, were we willing to be ashamed of the Church. What Jesus Christ is for God and for us, on earth and in time, He is as Lord of this community, as King of this people, as Head of this body and of all its members. He is all these with and in this inconspicuous, painfully divided, and otherwise very questionable Christendom. He is all these with, among, and in the Christians whom one can admire or even love only in the face of many serious difficulties. He is all these as the Reconciler and Redeemer of the whole world. He is all these, however, in the strange communion of these strange saints. The Church is not too mean a thing for him but, for better or for worse, sufficiently precious and worthy in His eyes to be entrusted with His witnessing and thus His affairs in the world—yes, even Himself. So great is God’s loving-kindness!”

— Karl Barth (in The Humanity of God)

“There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

— Gordon Marino (via fishfood)

“It’s drowning all your old rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea…, calling all the menagerie of polytheism…: dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht…, reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning…. And all because you are frightened of four words, ‘He was made man.’”

— Chesterton’s Father Brown, reflecting on the curious upsurge of “spirituality” among moderns (in The Incedulity of Father Brown)

“The diamond light of another time had turned muddy, and the places that had once been mine and sustained my memories were strange to me now.”

— Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

“I’ve often thought that Europe is an allegory for the ages of man. You’re born Italian. They’re relentlessly infantile and mother-obsessed. In childhood, we’re English: chronically shy, tongue-tied, cliquey, and only happy kicking balls, pulling the legs off things, or sending someone to Coventry. Teenagers are French: pretentiously philosophical, embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic and insincere. Then, in middle age, we become either Swiss or Irish. Old age is German: ponderous, pompous and pedantic. Then finally we regress into being Belgian, with no idea who we are at all.”

— A. A. Gill (found here, via NYT)

“It may be that we don’t often enough consider conversation as a form of social action, as a ministry, or as a spiritual discipline.”

— Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, qtd. here

“Biblical narrative, unlike the novel, does not use minute specification, but its very concision elevates ambiguity to a fine literary art. “And Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game. But Rebekah loved Jacob.” The odd imbalance of this sentence invites us to ponder its implications, as the matching images in the graphic version do not. The material cause for Isaac’s favoring Esau is peculiar, perhaps raising questions about the soundness of the old man’s judgment. Rebekah’s favoritism, on the other hand, is given no explanation, leading us, as so often happens with biblical characters, to speculate about motives. Is she fond of Jacob because he is the sedentary and—as we learn later—emotional son? Does she admire the quality of shrewdness she may perceive in him? Could she have some intuitive maternal sense that he is the one worthy of the birthright? Might she simply prefer smooth-skinned boys to hairy ones? This sort of hovering among possibilities is an essential element of the richness of biblical narrative.”

— Robert Alter