January 2012
32 posts
“Homeless in this world, not yet at home in the next, we human beings are...”
– Barth again, this time from a 1920 Confirmation lesson (also via McCormack’s Kantzer Lectures)
“We need not expect that life leads to sitting and possessing — in no...”
– Karl Barth, in a sermon on the final Sunday of 1913 (via Bruce McCormack’s Kantzer Lectures)
“Christ is held by the hand of hope. We hold him and are held. But it is a...”
– Paschasius Radbert
“Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary...”
– Faramerz Dabhoiwala
“Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid...”
– Sydney Smith, Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding (via triadic)
“… She hardly knew how to explain to a person considerably more musical than...”
– from The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh (after Dorothy L. Sayers)
“I more and more find the precious part of each day to be the thirty or forty...”
– Lesslie Newbigin
“The problem, perhaps, is that a successful presidential campaign calls on a trio...”
– Ross Douthat, “A Good Candidate is Hard to Find”
“I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than...”
– Teju Cole
“Q: What is your only comfort in life and death?
A: That I am not my own, but...”
– Happy birthday to the Heidelberg Catechism, via Fred Sanders
“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within us or we...”
– Vaclav Havel. (There are few things I believe more strongly than this. And I learned it first from Tolkien and Bunny Colvin.)
“Thus it is that, as noted earlier, Jesus’ invocation of the Biblical sequence...”
– Alan Jacobs, “Christianity and the Future of the Book”
Eve Tushnet's Best-of-2011 list →
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a...”
– Elizabeth Warren, quoted here
“The next book, found in a strip mall store in Niles, nicely brought up the issue...”
– from my friend Brett Foster’s story of introducing cerebral randomness into his life again over the Christmas holiday break
Jeanne Murray Walker, "Faults"
Then my mother became my child. I’d felt so light on the teeter-totter that I was surprised by such power, holding someone so important in the sky with nothing but my weight on the other side. It was kind of thrilling, kind of strange. And I noticed the earth is jagged with faults and fractures. Grass staggers in uneven dirt and the shoreline zigs and zags. You can never glue the two uneven...
“[We can] correct woolliness of view as to what Christian commitment involves, by...”
– J. I. Packer
“As I said, the church’s stance on homosexual activity and its opposition to...”
– James Martin, S.J.
“With regard to the sharpest and most melting sorrow, that which arises from the...”
– Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler, 15 May 1750. Sometime I’d like to do a literary survey of this theme — the connection between friendship and grief. Ben Myers was the first person who drew my attention to the frequency of this connection, which is maybe most powerfully portrayed in...
“Jacobs has reshaped not only how I think about reading but how and what I...”
– Lauren Winner, talking about The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
“Certainly I have met with little of the fabled *odium theologicum* from...”
– C. S. Lewis
“I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape...”
– Andrew Wyeth, quoted here
“[Scripture] cannot be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our...”
– John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine
Jennifer Grotz, "Poppies"
There is a sadness everywhere present but impossible to point to, a sadness that hides in the world and lingers. You look for it because it is everywhere. When you give up, it haunts your dreams with black pepper and blood and when you wake you don’t know where you are.
But then you see the poppies, a disheveled stand of them. And the sun shining down like God, loving all of us equally, mountain...
“[Graham] Greene learned at an early age how fully the subconscious has access to...”
– Pico Iyer, from this thoroughly enjoyable essay
“A planetary visitor might read through the whole of his voluminous works without...”
– W. H. Auden on Kierkegaard. This quote came to mind as I was talking with my friend Noah today about how we’ve both survived grad school. A big part of our success (such as it’s been), we agreed, is owing to our making meals and sharing them with friends on a regular basis.
“Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I...”
– one of Clyde Kilby’s resolutions
“Several years ago, I happened to be visiting my parents when a longtime friend...”
– Peter Leithart. I’ve posted this before, and it’s still the best little anecdote I’ve found that captures what liturgy has meant for my Christian experience.
“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I...”
– from the best thing Andrew Sullivan has written
December 2011
26 posts
“… nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christmas Eve 1943, writing from prison to his niece and best friend
“Because of piety’s penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology does...”
– Tom Oden (via Philip Tallon on Twitter)
“Still, there’s that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other...”
– Teju Cole. This is something I’ve thought about off and on over the years, but I’d like to reflect on it more deeply and carefully: the sense we have that paying attention and having attention paid to us — noticing and being noticed — is in some way redemptive.
“Let us, then, meditate upon the Nativity just as we see it happening in our own...”
– Martin Luther
Mary Karr, "Descending Theology: Christ Human"
Such a short voyage for a god, and you arrived in animal form so as not to scorch us with your glory. Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk, sticky eyes smeared blind, limbs rendered useless in swaddle. You came among beasts as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying as we all do, because the human frame is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime. Any wanting soul...
“God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in...”
– go read the whole excerpt from one of Bonhoeffer’s prison letters over at Nijay Gupta’s blog
“In our strange cultural moment it is necessary to make a distinction between...”
– The Book of Books - What Literature Owes the Bible - NYTimes.com (via ayjay)
“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is...”
– Teju Cole on the “#firstworldproblems” meme, in a series of tweets compiled by Alexis Madrigal (via risenapes)
my year in books
Here’s a list of my most memorable reading experiences from the year, although not all of these were published in 2011.
In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin by Ian McFarland was probably the most stimulating theology book I read this year. McFarland, following Barth, stresses the retrospective character of the doctrine of original sin: in light of...
“Ah, so big a question! That is the whole question of theology, you see! I should...”
– Karl Barth, answering the question from a student, “What one thing, sir, would you tell a young pastor today if you were asked, is necessary in this day and age to pastor a Church?” Best advice I’ve read in a long time.
“Advent celebrates the coming of the King, but the Christian tradition has always...”
– Peter Leithart
“When the ground crumbles under their feet, [people] *have* to leap even into...”
– W. H. Auden (via Mockingbird)
“Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The...”
– Peter Hitchens on his brother Christopher (via ayjay)
“This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding...”
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
Homily for the Third Sunday of Advent
(given at Church of the Apostles, Columbia, South Carolina)
Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:12-28; John 1:6-8, 19-28.
Heavenly Father, you gave your apostles grace truly to believe and to preach your word. Grant that we might love what they believed and preach what they taught, through Christ our Lord, Amen.
A couple of months ago, I was in Italy with some good friends. One of the...