April 2012
3 tags
March 2012
10 tags
“We worship the God of Easter morning, therefore, only because he is first and...”
– Ralph C. Wood, Preaching and Professing
8 tags
“He comes as the grain of wheat that has died, and he will bear fruit among them....”
– Pope Benedict, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two
4 tags
“One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you...”
– Flannery O’Connor
6 tags
“For me writing has always felt like praying.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
12 tags
“I have found that writing is the way I most easily pray.”
– Sam Wells, Power and Passion
12 tags
“Our grammar often betrays us. We say we have a body. That seems to suggest that...”
– Stanley Hauerwas, Working With Words
7 tags
“I observe in Hannah’s Child that most people do not have to become theologians...”
– Stanley Hauerwas, The Surprise of Being a Christian
10 tags
“We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that...”
– Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens
10 tags
“I do not want to be “with it.” I quit teaching freshmen when I taught at the...”
– Stanley Hauerwas, Why Did Jesus Have to Die? An Attempt to Cross the Barrier of Age
7 tags
“Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of...”
– Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
1 tag
14 tags
“If Jesus is indeed what God communicates to us, God’s language for us, his...”
– Rowan Williams, Writing In the Dust
11 tags
“What use is faith to us if it is only a transcription into mythological jargon...”
– Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust
13 tags
“If, as St. Augustine says in his Confessions, we can fail to ‘love...”
– Rowan William, Writing in the Dust
3 tags
13 tags
“What should strike us is Jesus’ initial refusal [in John 9] to make the...”
– Rowan Williams, Writing In the Dust
10 tags
Christian eschatology is defined by two affirmations: first, the affirmation that God is ‘other,’ which alone makes his essence as love understandable but which also can only become visible in Jesus’ coming from God; and, secondly, the affirmation that suffering and death belong to finitude and contribute to redeeming the guilt of the world. Both of these determine Christian...
5 tags
“Any really outrageous human action tests to the limit our careful theological...”
– Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust
10 tags
“For the Christian, Chronos is from everlasting to everlasting contained by...”
– Mark Schwehn in Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation
5 tags
“I think I chose history over philosophy because I needed ideas clothed in flesh...”
– Mark Schwehn in Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation
8 tags
“So powerful is this thirst that the Lord relates it to the unity of his person:...”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption
This is lovely.
11 tags
“Watch with me.” By asking them to watch with him, he gives them the...”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption
9 tags
“At the center of the Church is Christ. For a Christian, it is impossible to see...”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption
9 tags
“If Christ, in Luke, commands us to carry our cross every day, he implies very...”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption
13 tags
“Redemption is a reopening. If you wish, it is truly the center of the event of...”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption
10 tags
“it is surely the crisis of the Episcopal Church, as well as other western...”
– Sam Wells
2 tags
“Make their loins shake continually” is possibly my favorite vindictive prayer in the Bible.
6 tags
Love and Lent | The Christian Century →
“I saw him in the parking lot with her. I think he wanted to get caught,” my mom’s hushed voice bleeds with betrayal. Unlike most gossip, this conversation doesn’t have the quality of a listener, hungry for salacious trivialities. The whole house feels on edge, as I sit on the couch in an adjoining room, straining to hear.
I’m fifteen years old. I missed church...
9 tags
“Worship is the moment when human beings, on behalf of all creation, justified by...”
– Sam Wells
I’m impressed that this sentence made it past his editor. The run-on is just magnificent.
7 tags
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of...”
– Jaroslav Pelikan
13 tags
“The threefold formulation “Scripture, tradition, and reason” is the...”
– Sam Wells
2 tags
“It is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that...”
– Pascal
3 tags
“The power of flies; they win battles, hinder our soul from acting, eat our body.”
– Pascal
The Problem with Rowan Williams →
kormosendre:
ohzeitgeist:
waste-my-days:
Giles Fraser, the former canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, reports hearing a bishop say: “The problem with Rowan Williams is that he is too bloody Christian.”
Or this,
“Simply put, Williams believes in the Church more than he believes in his own opinions. All his troubles as Archbishop of Canterbury have stemmed from this fact. He believes...
8 tags
“Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me...”
– Pascal, Pensees
24 tags
“Sin is living as if there were no God, no grace of God, no creation to remember...”
– Sam Wells
8 tags
“Two kinds of persons know Him: those who have a humble heart, and who love...”
– Pascal, Pensees
13 tags
“St. Paul’s proclamation of the resurrection of the body, and the...”
– Sam Wells
2 tags
Rend the Heavens and Come Down →
A professor once told me that if the Messiah had in fact already come, he needed to come again. He could see no discernable impact that Jesus’ incarnation had had on world history; he argued that the world was too on the edge of destruction for the messianic arrival to have already taken place.
I confess that I agree with him, most of the time.
And yet. And yet. Perhaps this is a grace-filled...
10 tags
“It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith:...”
– Pascal, Pensees
14 tags
“God’s will to be in relationship becomes the logic of the universe - but...”
– Sam Wells
7 tags
“It is an astounding fact that no canonical writer has ever made use of nature to...”
– Pascal, Pensees
5 tags
“The church is not simply a means to an end, a boat from which to fish for new...”
– Sam Wells
Rowan Williams and Sam Wells have been friends for a long time, and I think this is partly why. They share a similar view on the necessity of keeping the Anglican Communion together. Whatever you might think about Rowan William’s views on homosexuality, his ability to hold people...
2 tags
I Will See God →
It is hard to sit here, eight weeks from graduation. I still don’t have a job, and I lack all desire to write anything, let alone the thesis project that has consumed me for almost a year now. Everything will get done, but I would like to avoid that written-the-night-before full-blown panic mode that seems to become more and more necessary as each day passes. I feel totally lost in the desert,...
Why does sunny, warm weather make other people happy and me a grumpy mess? This phenomenon never ceases to amaze me.
Seriously, give me shade and light rain and patchy clouds and late nights and low lamp lighting.
3 tags
12 tags
“The gesture of hands outstretched in blessing expresses Jesus’s continuing...”
– Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two
9 tags
“Speculation over history, looking ahead into the unknown future - these are not...”
– Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two
