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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 44dab7d | The church's theology bought into this ahistoricism in different ways: along a more liberal, post-Kantian trajectory, the historical particularities of Christian faith were reduced to atemporal moral teachings that were universal and unconditioned. Thus it turned out that what Jesus taught was something like Kant's categorical imperative - a universal ethics based on reason rather than a set of concrete practices related to a specific commu.. | christianity church-history evangelicalism god liberal-christianity primitivism tradition | James K.A. Smith | |
| b9677d9 | Because of this Christian materialism, a catholic postmodernism (or postmodern catholicity) affirms sacramentality on two levels. On the one hand, it affirms a general sacramentality: the whole world has potential to function as a window to God and a means of grace from God because God himself affirms materiality as a good thing. We see this not only in creation itself but also in the reaffirmation of it in the incarnation, in which God is .. | god materiality means-of-grace sacramentalism | James K.A. Smith | |
| f38b99c | In fact, I must tell you that in the past couple years I've become convinced that perhaps nothing is so important for our walk with the Lord as good friends. I think God gives us good friends as sacraments - means of grace given to us as indices of God's presence and conduits for our sanctification. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| eea13ad | You can't think your way into new hungers. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 7230b8d | By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been ex.. | christianity knowledge lyotard metanarrative narrative objectivity philosophy prejudice the-enlightenment | James K.A. Smith | |
| 3f3789e | For example: never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view, especially when dinner is the primary occasion for sibling bickering. Yet even then, members of your little tribe are learning to love their neighbor. And your children are learning something about the faithful promises of a covenant-keeping L.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| f804279 | Instead, Taylor is concerned with the "conditions of belief" -- a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| a1ef00a | Subtraction stories Accounts that explain "the secular" as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what's left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasizes that the secular is produced, not just distilled." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| e0ef789 | An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out "skilled workers") that see t.. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| b69fd2d | What if education wasn't first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love? | James K.A. Smith | ||
| a6d87e8 | This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it's a book Augustine has written about you. It's a journey with Augustine as a journey into oneself. It's a travelogue of the heart. It's a road trip with a prodigal who's already been where you think you need to go. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 9620008 | Liturgy," as I'm using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we're for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation. To return to our metaphor above, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies: they bend the needle of our hearts." | James K.A. Smith | ||
| 6ff88da | In Jack Kerouac's iconic novel On the Road, the narrator Sal Paradise plays chronicler to the antics of the star of the story, Dean Moriarty, who is really the exemplar, the hero, the model. So just call me Sal. I've been on a ride with Augustine. Here's what I've seen; here's what he's shown me (about myself); here's why you might consider coming along. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| d15cc90 | He meets us where we are, as creatures of habit who are shaped by practices, and invites us into a community of practice that is the very of his Son. Liturgy is the way we learn to 'put on' Christ. | James K.A. Smith | ||
| a50f1af | a worldwide flood destroyed all life on earth about five thousand years ago requires denying an immense amount of generally accepted knowledge--from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, cave paintings, and more. | Marcus J. Borg | ||
| 1209dd1 | And let's not forget that George Washington "loved the Indians," according to Glenn Beck,126 never mind that he waged an annihilationist war against them. Indeed, Washington wrote to Major General John Sullivan, imploring him to "lay waste" to all Iroquois settlements, so that their lands may not be "merely overrun but destroyed."127" -- | Tim Wise | ||
| 18ae2c5 | Man who waits for roast duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time. | Guy Kawasaki | ||
| 4868209 | Create like a god. Command like a king. Work like a slave. --Constantine Brancusi | Guy Kawasaki | ||
| e02bb3b | The widow of Michael Reardon was a full-breasted woman in her late thirties. She had dark hair and green eyes, and an Irish nose spattered with a clicheful of freckles. She had a face for merry-go-rounds and roller coaster rides, a face that could split in laughter and girlish glee when water was splashed on her at the seashore. She was a girl who could get drunk sniffing the vermouth cork before it was passed over a martini. She was a girl.. | Ed McBain | ||
| 538614a | We got enough champagne here to start a France. | Ed McBain | ||
| 27a05d5 | They'd like the world to think they're hot snot on a gold platter. But really, they're just cold boogers on a paper plate. | Mary Kay Andrews | ||
| d023075 | That horror which stalks in the stillness of the noonday, when the glare of an artificial sunshine lights up the motionless trees, moved all about her. In front and behind she was aware of it. Beyond this stealthy silence, just within the edge of it, the things of another world were passing. But she could not know them. Her husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe, yes, but for her they were out of reach. She might not share with .. | nature | Algernon Blackwood | |
| d9cd1c2 | Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... - Algernon Blackwood | H.P. Lovecraft | ||
| 8e9532d | For Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. He had seen much life; had read many books. The passionate desire of youth to solve the world's big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim with wonder. Anything might be true. Nothing surprised him. The most outlandish beliefs, fo.. | Algernon Blackwood | ||
| 7e50f21 | But the fact that judges follow precedent regularly even though not invariably does not support the legalistic theory as strongly as one might expect. The original precedent in a line of precedents could not have been based on precedent. | precedents precedents-and-their-discontents | Richard A. Posner | |
| cc23b8d | The Bluebook is an absurdity, but it endures, in fact thrives, impervious to criticism and ridicule. The judiciary navigates the sea of modernity, slowed, thrown of course, by the barnacles of legal formalism (semantic escapes from reality, impoverished sense of context, fear of math and science, insensitivity to language and culture, mangling of history, superfluous footnotes, verbosity, excessive quotation, reader-unfriendly prose, exagge.. | bluebook harvard-bluebook legal-realism | Richard A. Posner | |
| 7ec2a5a | Benedict's resignation was a selfless act since he had come to realize he was not capable of leading the modern church and making the tough decisions that were needed. "It wasn't one thing, but a whole combination of them," concluded Paolo Rodari, Il Foglio's veteran Vatican reporter. Vatileaks, said Rodari, "was a constant drumbeat on the Pope."33" | Gerald Posner | ||
| 5132cfc | In a historic 1933 accord, the Vatican was the first sovereign state to sign a bilateral treaty with Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. The Nazis promised to protect Catholics inside Germany in return for the church endorsing Hitler's government. | Gerald Posner | ||
| 514551f | Mussolini's insistence on public morality, belief in the inferior role of women, and the ban on contraception and abortion made the fascists palatable to the church.85 | Gerald Posner | ||
| c31890d | John Paul was a bystander as the American church quietly approved an aggressive new legal strategy that included, as The Washington Post uncovered, "hiring high-powered law firms and private detectives to examine the personal lives of the church's accusers, fighting to keep documents secret and engaging in new tactics to minimize settlements."65" | Gerald Posner | ||
| e247a87 | A report that studied death certificates from the mid-1980s concluded that "The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population." | Gerald Posner | ||
| 44ef9fd | Everyone left London just shaking their heads in disbelief," recalled Elan Steinberg, the World Jewish Congress's representative. "Two hundred tons of gold from the pro-Nazi Croatian government found its way to the Vatican. Here they were, one of the world's great moral institutions, and they refused to tell us what their view was, much less to lift a finger to help recover any looted assets. It was terribly disappointing."44" | Gerald Posner | ||
| 2785417 | These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity. | populists | Orlando Figes | |
| af6de08 | Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever. | Orlando Figes | ||
| 8de9e5f | It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary. | lenin marxism | Orlando Figes | |
| 50545ee | In 1846 Easter fell on the same date in the Latin and Greek Orthodox calendars, so the holy shrines were much more crowded than usual, and the mood was very tense. The two religious communities had long been arguing about who should have first right to carry out their Good Friday rituals on the altar of Calvary inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the spot where the cross of Jesus was supposed to have been inserted in the rock. During r.. | Orlando Figes | ||
| 45b8dd8 | Lenin was always prone to overestimate the physical danger to himself: in this respect he was something of a coward. | danger lenin russian-revolution | Orlando Figes | |
| f059d81 | In the mind of the ordinary peasant the Tsar was not just a kingly ruler but a god on earth. He thought of him as a father-figure who knew all the peasants personally by name, understood their problems in all their minute details, and, if it were not for the evil boyars who surrounded him, would satisfy their demands. Hence the peasant tradition of sending direct appeals to the Tsar. | Orlando Figes | ||
| fc9151d | With the Russian Empire teetering on the brink of collapse, the tsarist regime responded to the crises with its usual incompetence and obstinacy. The basic problem was that Nicholas himself remained totally oblivious to the extremity of the situation. While the country sank deeper into chaos he continued to fill his diary with terse and trivial notes on the weather, the company at tea and the number of birds he had shot that day. When Bulyg.. | Orlando Figes | ||
| a24cc0b | Small nations, when treated as equals, become the firmest of allies." It" -- | Pat Frank | ||
| 99636dd | Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mouth and--humiliation of humiliations--she began to cry. Right there in the street. "I'm so confused," she said but it came out as a great honking wail. "Come here, you silly girl," Phyllis said. The woman put her arms around Rosy, patted her back, and for the first time in forever, Rosy allowed herself to just cry. A young mother with twins i.. | emotion humiliation overwhelmed | R.G. Manse | |
| b2a854e | Can I cuddle up with you when you sleep?" Sma stopped, detached the creature from her shoulder with one hand and stared it in the face. "What?" "Just for chumminess' sake," the little thing said, yawning wide and blinking. "I'm not being rude; it's a good bonding procedure." Sma was aware of Skaffen-Amtiskaw glowing red just behind her. She brought the yellow and brown device closer to her face. "Listen, Xenophobe--" "Xeny." "Xeny. You.. | humor kawaii | Iain M. Banks | |
| b41c74e | With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan. And yet Randy stopped...The incident was important only because it was self-revelatory. Randy knew he would have to play by the old rules. He could not shuck his code, or sneak out of his era. | Pat Frank | ||
| 3f551e2 | He was tough as an antique ivory figurine, which has withstood the viscissitudes of centuries and can accept more. | Pat Frank |