May 2012
April 2012
And...
I’m done with college.
“Jesus of Nazareth dressed like a Jew, prayed like a Jew (and most likely in Aramaic), instructed other Jews on how best to live according to the commandments given by God to Moses, taught like a Jew, argued like a Jew with other Jews, and died like thousands of other Jews on a Roman cross. To see him in a first-century Jewish context and to listen to his words with first-century Jewish ears does not in any way undermine Christian theological claims. Jesus does not have to be fully unique in order to say something or do something meaningful.”
—Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew
“Historically, Jesus should be seen as continuous with the line of Jewish teachers and prophets, for he shares with them a particular view of the world and a particular manner of expressing that view. Like Amos and Isaiah, Hosea and Jeremiah, he used arresting speech, risked political persecution, and turned traditional family values upside down in order to proclaim what he believed God wants, the Torah teaches, and Israel must do. This historical anchoring need not and should not, in Christian teachings, preclude or overshadow Jesus’s role in the divine plan. He must, in the Christian tradition, be more than just a really fine Jewish teacher. But he must be that Jewish teacher as well.”
—Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew
“…Pope Benedict, all I can say is: You are crazy to mess with nuns.”
—
Nicholas D. Kristof (via azspot)
It would be really great if people would start talking about the LCWR situation in a nuanced and reasonable way instead of the two extremes I have seen from most people.
“In the churches, as Jesus continues to be the symbol for all that is socially good, Christian ministers and laity alike depict his Jewish background as the epitome of all that is wrong with the world. If Jesus preaches good news to the poor, so the common impression goes, ‘the Jews’ must be preaching good news to the rich. If Jesus welcomes sinners, ‘the Jews’ must have pushed them away. If Jesus speaks to or heals women, ‘the Jews much have set up a patriarchal society that makes the Taliban look progressive.”
—Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew
“The role of the explicit biblical Word in Dostoevsky’s narratives is less that of a decisive intervention of the transcendent, cutting through irony and obliqueness, more that of a reminder of the depth behind all the exchanges of discourse, a depth offering not a simple last word but an assurance of some foundational energy that keeps human narrative open to absolution, whatever occurs.”
—Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
“The actual currency of history is language: to speak, as we have done in previous chapters, about the affirmation of history is to speak about the affirmation of language. And if the Devil’s aim is silence, God’s is speech, the dialogic speech by which we shape each other.”
—Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
“The life of Christ is a unique set of events, which has as a matter of fact altered what can be said about God and human beings; no fictional representation can be contemporary with that alteration, since all subsequent language is dependent upon it. But the Devil is associated with no such set of events. The Devil’s priority is to prevent historical change and to freeze human agency in the timelessness of a ‘rational’ order in which love or reconciliation is impossible. The Devil can only act, as we have seen, by utilizing the vacuum that opens up when human agents surrender to despair or the cessation of desire. He depends on the dissolution of character and can only be shown in fiction by the narrating of this dissolution into untruth or unreality.”
—Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction
“Today Jesus’ words are too familiar, too domesticated, too stripped of their initial edginess and urgency. Only when heard through first-century ears can their original edginess and urgency be recovered. Consequently, to understand the man from Nazareth, it is necessary to understand Judaism. More, it is necessary to see Jesus as firmly within Judaism rather than as standing apart from it, and it is essential that the picture of Judaism not be distorted through the filter of centuries of Christian stereotypes; a distorted picture of first-century Judaism inevitably leads to a distorted picture of Jesus…. If one takes the incarnation seriously - that is, the claim that the “Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14) - seriously, then one should take seriously the time when, place where, and people among whom this event occurred.”
—Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus
“Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world.”
—
Pope Benedict XVI
Always a good reminder, but I really needed this today…
“Body and soul constitute human nature. The body is no less good than the soul. In mortifying the natural we must not injure the body or the soul. We are not to destroy it but to transform it, as iron is transformed in the fire. Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to the angels.”
—Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
“For the church to lack love is for the church to lack everything. No heresy could conceivably be worse! …We evangelical Christians often insist that we are loving; it’s just that the world is so sinful they can’t see it—or so we tell ourselves. They don’t understand what “true love” is. That attitude is frankly as arrogant as it is tragic. …If contemporary people don’t see in us what ancient people saw in Christ, it can only be because the love that was present in Christ isn’t present in us. And if they see in us what they saw in ancient Pharisees, it can only be because the self-righteousness found in the Pharisees is found in us. Our comical insistence that we are loving, despite our reputation, is a bit like a man insisting he’s a perfectly loving husband when his wife, kids, and all who know him insist he’s an unloving, self-righteous jerk. If he persists in his self-serving opinion of himself, insisting that his wife, kids, and all who know him don’t understand what “true love” is, it simply confirms the perspective these others have of him. This, I submit, is precisely the position much of the evangelical church of America is in. Until the culture at large instinctively identifies us as loving, humble servants, and until the tax collectors and prostitutes of our day are beating down our doors to hang out with us as they did with Jesus, we have every reason to accept our culture’s judgment of us as correct. We are indeed more pharisaic than we are Christlike.”
—
Why does everyone depict the Pharisees as the epitome of self-righteousness and legalism? It drives me crazy. We Christians need to do a much better job when we talk about 1st century Judaism.
“We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.”
—Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
“His word was in my heart like a burning fire
Shut up in my bones;
I was weary of holding it back,
And I could not.” —
Shut up in my bones;
I was weary of holding it back,
And I could not.” —
Jeremiah 20:9
This was the epigraph for my thesis.
“I have said over and over again that Catholics have more faith in God than they have in man and that is the trouble with religion. It is a transferring of our hopes from earth to heaven and from man to God to such an extent that we turn to pie in the sky and forget that we are all members of the Mystical Body of Christ right here on this earth.”
—Dorothy Day
29,864 words.
Finished.
“Certainly we know our vocation if we are happy in our work. “Necessity” and “impulse” and “attraction” are the 3 signs, Caussade says, of the will of God.”
—Dorothy Day
On the side of the dusty road, a man sits, legs crossed, hands cupped in hope. His ears have memorized by now the rhythm of the road to Jericho; farmers bringing in their crops on creaky carts, merchants with their heavy-treading donkeys, Roman cohorts raising clouds of throat-burning dust. Life is hard and no one has any coins to spare for the man’s empty hands. God is silent.
The man hears noise in the distance, thousands of shuffling feet, a great crowd. People sweep past him and he catches the edge of someone’s clothing. “What’s happening?” he says loudly. “It’s Jesus of Nazareth,” says the passerby.
“Jesus.” the man says quietly. “Jesus!” he shouts. “Son of David! Have mercy on me!”
Someone takes him by the shoulder and gives him a shake. “Shut up. You’re disturbing the great teacher. What can he do for you anyway?”
“Jesus!” The man shouts even louder. “Son of David! Have mercy on me!”
A voice from within the crowd. “Bring him here.” People raise the man to his feet, muttering. Hands shove him forward. He is jostled by bodies and emerges into empty space.
“What do you want me to do for you?” The crowd is quiet.
The man’s voice echos in the silence. “Lord, I want to see.”
No one breathes. And Jesus speaks. “Receive your sight, your faith has healed you.” And the man opens his eyes and looks around him, sees hands lifted in praise to a God who has not abandoned his people.
Lord have mercy.
