Quick Quotation

We don't know what it means to walk a mile, let alone to walk it in someone else's shoes.

The applicable line from the wondrous poem God's Grandeur is italicized:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Quotations

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it
-Flannery O'Connor

Vicisti, Galilaee ("You have won, Galilean")
-Julian the Apostate

"The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried. If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you ask me to trust my temperament; my own temperament which can be turned upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood of my body."
-GK Chesterton in the Ball and the Cross

The traditional exegesis of the New Testament emphasized tapping the text for divine meaning. This was good as far as it went for the fathers and doctors were very effective in most cases in deriving or demonstrating doctrine right from the inspired words of Scripture. The only disadvantage of this was that they sometimes treated the narrative itself as an egg to be cracked through to obtain the nutritious yolk of God’s word. The importance of the egg itself was often missed. Often they did not read Luke as Luke or Paul as Paul but were interested mainly in the bottom line of truth apart from identification of truth with the author and his historical situation. Both the Church fathers and the scholastics tended to take isolated affirmations of Scripture and quickly press them into theological service sometimes quite apart from the literary context or the intentions of the original authors. Moreover historical questions about the sources used by biblical writers and their particular literary style in conveying truth were usually not even asked. The unsystematic character (real or imagined) of patristic and medieval exegesis has made it most difficult to incorporate the insights of the ancients into the modern discussion, even when there has been a desire to do so.
-Peter Brown on Catholic Biblical Scholarship

Question of the Day

Do I love Protestant hymns because I love German drinking songs, or do I love German drinking songs because I love Protestant hymns?

Quick Thoughts

2 thoughts on protests:

1. The best way to quell a protest is to bring many groups into it. It then ceases to be a protest and continues as a celebration. "You have something to protest? What do you know, I do too!" In this way, expectations and self-loathing are beat out by the carnivalesque and mutual yelling.

2. Much of the immigration rally supporter's rhetoric seems to revolve around them being united (from the few minutes I listened to on Talk of the Nation) against everyone else. Are they suggesting that we are not united? Is division itself the problem here? Though I'd imagine that they'd be rather angered if the rest of the country started to oppose any semblance of policy that they might put forward, would this "unity" fix the problem? Or perhaps their movement just appears to me more as monotony than as unity.

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Scot McKnight discusses the first part of Tom Wright's new book: Simply Christian.

Mark Horne on "Christianity: who needs it? (thoughts on 1 Tim).

Just as there is no such thing as Americanism, there is no such thing as Christianity. Jesus never proclaimed Christianity while he was with us on the earth. Nor did His Apostles preach Christianity. We live in an age of ideologies and ideological religions where people define themselves by virtue of certain ideas they believe. It is popular these days to talk about choosing a "world view" or a "belief system" of a "philosophy." Ayn Rand is just one idea peddlar among many others. One can consider Marxism, libertarianism, conservatism, liberalism, humanism, nihilism, hinduism, buddhism, spiritism, transcendentalism, existentialism, pragmatism, theism, atheism and so on. The list of "isms" is endless. But there is no "ism" found in God’s Word, the Bible. You will not find "Christianity" among it’s pages. Saint Paul did not spread Christianity in his journeys through the Mediterranean world. Rather, he was instrumental in spreading the Church.

It is not Christianity you need.

You need the Church.