January 2009
54 posts
“When did we ever not have to repent while we learnt? When did obedience not go...”
– Oliver O’Donovan
(in his book Resurrection and Moral Order)
“It’s just shocking when a very intelligent person is no longer looking out...”
– Nicholson Baker, talking about Updike (qtd. here)
“And finally, I want everyone at this table, eating my blood and my body, to...”
– Jesus, in Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (reviewed here by Lauren Winner)
The Places We Live →
One more: Cloud Cult, “Love You All.”...
Cloud Cult again. “The Ghost Inside our...
“I think if you’re happy, it would probably be impossible to do comedy at...”
– Craig Ferguson (here)
“Every self-respecting writer of any significance is a saboteur, and, as he...”
– Andrei Sinyavsky
Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall
I was at a lecture last night given by Daniel Sulmasy, a Franciscan friar who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy. He’s written several books on medicine and spirituality. But I’m not really wanting to blog about his lecture or ideas, as interesting as it was and they are. Mainly I just want to pass along the names of a couple of poets whose poems Dr. Sulmasy read during the...
“Maybe if you ate more comfort food, you wouldn’t have to go around...”
– best line from last night
“Our life and our death is with our neighbor.”
– attributed to St. Anthony the Great
“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small,...”
– President Barack Obama
“Calvary is a telescope through which we look into the long vista of eternity and...”
– MLK in his book Strength to Love, 1963
“Writing is to living as grass is to soil.”
– Scott Russell Sanders
"This is the world we got, people"
I’ve thought a lot about the idea of the “long defeat” — the idea that it can be a noble and beautiful thing to stay put and keep fighting in a struggle you’re pretty sure you’re going to end up losing — ever since first hearing about it in, of all things, a German class in college. My professor told us there’s an old Germanic ideal of a “fated...
“Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she...”
– Toni Morrison, describing her daily routine in The Paris Review (via this very enjoyable blog) (Hat tip: PEG 2.0)
“People change, and smile: but the agony abides.”
– T. S. Eliot (from the “Four Quartets”)
“One of [Charles] Williams’s most passionately held ideas involved what he...”
– Alan Jacobs, in his biography of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian
“Do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is born.”
– Didache 2.2, the earliest extant Christian prohibition of abortion (ca. 100 c.e.).
This translation is by Bart Ehrman in the Loeb Classical Library. The Greek reads: ou phoneuseis teknon en phthora oude gennethen apokteneis.
Thanks, Noah.
Hot water freezes mid-air @ MPLS →
preciseandtowering:
From WCCO. More cold, more snow, on their way.
It really is very cold. Pushing a dead car through the snow at work this morning in -15 degree temp wasn’t very fun.
snowed in
A bottle of two-buck Chuck + a game of Ticket to Ride with friends + a fire in the fireplace = a nice evening.
“Since we’re billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable, why not go...”
– Bill Vitek and Wes Jackson
“… a politics with no biology, or a politics without field biology, or a...”
– Barry Lopez
Anne Porter, "Four Poems in One"
At six o’clock this morning I saw the rising sun Resting on the ground like a boulder In the thicket back of the school, A single great ember About the height of a man.
***
Night has gone like a sickness, The sky is pure and whole. Our Lady of Poland spire Is rosy with first light, Starlings above it shatter their dark flock. Notes of the Angelus Leave their great iron cup And slowly,...
“To those who speak to the many deaf ears attend.
To those who speak to one,
In...”
– Kathleen Raine
"Sleeping Sickness" by City and Colour →
An interactive music video. Pretty cool. Plus, Dallas Green’s tattoos are great.
“Man, here you are again, eatin’ food that *food* eats.”
– one of my coworkers, commenting on my boss’s lunch (salad and carrots) vs. his (pizza with lots of meat) today
“In fact, [Rowan] Williams is best viewed as part of the rebellion against the...”
– Jordan Hylden
“If you want to know what America is like, just flip on a game in the National...”
– Jason Byassee
“My first memory has always been of me and my mom on a cold grey day at some...”
– from the liner notes to the Fleet Foxes album, which I, along with a lot of other people, really like
“Here is the only memory that is dear to my heart. Remember when we were in...”
– Florence Beauchard, from the forward to her brother David B.’s graphic memoir Epileptic
“I am disturbed to discover that the playwright Dennis Potter who has through...”
– Angela Tilby, a religious broadcaster in the UK, in her 1980 essay titled “Spirit of the Age: A reflection on ten years of theology, television, mad vicars and magazines”
“… if the landless peasants of Cange [a village in Haiti] needed to believe...”
– Tracy Kidder, yet again
(Check out these thoughts on Mountains Beyond Mountains and then go read the book)
“One time [Paul Farmer’s] brother Jeff, the wrestler, sent him a card in...”
– Tracy Kidder again on Paul Farmer and Partners In Health
“… the idea that some lives matter less than some others’… is...”
– Tracy Kidder, summarizing the view of Dr. Paul Farmer, in Mountains Beyond Mountains
