oh! I figured it out! There’s another Thomas Moore, popular (pseudo-) spiritual writer careofthesoul.net/books…
YES!!!!! That’s so funny, because someone must have quoted this Thomas Moore (with two o’s) and then someone else thought it was the saint and propagated the idea.
We should make a Snopes for quotations, you guys. This might be the best idea I’ve ever had.
UPDATE: I found it. It’s in Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality, page 105.
I think there needs to be a Snopes for quotations. This is getting ridiculous.
I highly doubt that the following quote is authentic:
Sex and religion are closer to each other than either might prefer.
Apparently Sir Thomas More said it, but that’s almost impossible unless this is a really corrupted form of something he said. The OED says that ‘sex’ wasn’t used as a shortened form of ‘sexual intercourse’ (or other related terms) until at least the 1800s.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
- T.S. Eliot
(I heard three different people use the ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’ line today)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
The Oxford American has a religion column that it publishes on tumblr. Take a look:
Flannery O’Connor famously called our South a “Christ-haunted” place. If so, he haunts it indiscriminately, whether you want him to or not, whether you spend your Sunday mornings with the New York Times or with the Pentecostals. He’s in our songs, our history, our family reunions, and he’s on our interstate billboards. Exactly why he haunts the South is the question that launched a thousand doctoral dissertations. But here’s this column’s working theory: He haunts the South because sin haunts the South. Our past, whether preserved in the marble of a hundred Confederate memorials or in the photos on our shelves, is heavy with guilt. And wherever guilt is, you won’t find religion far behind. Why does The Oxford American need a religion column? Because the South is a religious place.
Andrew Carlson writes in The Other Journal about Flannery O’Connor and the local church:
But I have been digging, trying to unearth signs of Grace, and I have been discovering Jesus on Aurora in the same way that I have learned to recognize the incarnation in Flannery O’Connor’s fictional worlds. O’Connor was driven by an artistic impulse to discover moments of grace as penetrations in the darker parts of reality, and rather than blinding us with beautiful images of redemption—in which she resolutely believed—she challenged her readers to find life in places where it’s harder to see. Reading her work, I sometimes get the sense that she was putting God to the test by contending so boldly what others do blithely, that if the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is somehow an animation of all reality, then in even the worst of our human predicaments we should be able to find signs of Grace. Aurora appears to be one of those darker places, and our church has been engaging in a provocation of O’Connor’s sort by pushing hard into that reality.
I also really like this photo of Flannery with a peacock:
[My Flannery O’Connor appreciation posts 1, 2, 3]
Ben Myers recently wrote in Faith and Theology about his year without prayer:
And then there was the year without prayer. Or was it two years? Three? Or five? I guess I lost count. Anyway, all that time I could not pray.
Don’t ask me why, don’t ask me to explain it. It’s not that I stopped believing: not exactly. It’s just that everything around me was a terrible silence, and any word, a shout or just a whisper, would only make the silence echo louder. It’s not that I had stopped loving: not completely. It’s just that my heart was cracked inside me, and all the words seemed stillborn, choked by sadness before they ever could get out. It’s not that I stopped trying: not quite. It’s just that I tried to pray instead of praying. It is the difference between trying to swim and swimming, between trying to remember someone’s name and remembering. You might come close, but in the end it makes no difference. In the end it is not a matter of degrees.
This post reminded me of one of my favorite quotations about prayer. In Power and Passion, Sam Wells says,
I have found that writing is the way I most easily pray.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born July 28, 1844.
His poetry did not become popular until after his death in 1889, but he is now widely recognized as one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era.
His most ambitious poem, and probably my favorite of his body of work, The Wreck of the Deutschland, was not published until 1918:
To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
As you may have guessed by now, I like finding misattributed quotations and trying to figure out their real origin.
I’m currently on the hunt for at least four quotes attributed to theologians, but I have also been thinking about finding the source of this one: “Ability is sexless.”
It is commonly attributed to John Henry Newman, but I think that is highly unlikely. I also found it attributed to Christabel Pankhurst, a suffragette from England. There’s a reference to her book, “Calling All Women,” but I can’t get the full-text online.
If anyone can find the original source, I would love you forever.
David Lumpkin writes in the Oxford American about televangelists, his father, and his mother’s mysterious (and very sad) disappearance:
The Trinity Broadcast Network is the largest religious-programming channel on American television. It was founded by Paul and Jan Crouch with the help of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. By the time Daddy started watching it, mid-summer 1995, Jim and Tammy Faye had long since fallen to scandal of both a sexual and financial variety, but Paul and Jan carried on. Jan looked like Tammy Faye’s sister, down to the mascara that turned to black rivulets when she cried on camera, which she did often. Her hair was a sprawling mess, sometimes tinted pink, sometimes purple. Paul was a silver-haired, unexceptional-looking man with an outdated mustache, who spoke of his growing number of broadcast satellites as if they were his warrior-angels in hand-to-hand combat against the Devil.
The day Daddy introduced me to Trinity, I was in the computer room, typing my little rhyming poems, which were as angry as death-metal lyrics. I was fifteen years old. He hollered, “Come in here and look at this!” with a lilt in his voice as if he’d seen something too funny to be missed. When I stepped into the recessed living room—an extension to the original trailer—he told me to sit down.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
- T.S. Eliot
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of ‘curation,’ and I agree with the author of this article in the New York Times magazine that there seems to be this tendency, enabled by Tumblr and Pinterest, of simply reblogging or pinning something that doesn’t belong to you and calling yourself a curator.
“Curation” does imply something far more deliberate than these inspiration blogs, whose very point is to put the viewer into an aesthetic reverie unencumbered by thought or analysis. These sites are not meant (as curation is) to make us more conscious, but less so. That might be O.K., but it also means they have a lot more in common with advertising than they do with curation. After all, advertising trains us to keep our desire always at the ready, nurturing that feeling that something is missing, then redirecting it toward a tangible product. In the end, all that pent-up yearning needs a place to go, and now it has that place online. But products are no longer the point. The feeling is the point. And now we can create that feeling for ourselves, then pass it around like a photo album of the life we think we were meant to have but don’t, the people we think we should be but aren’t.
There are real curators on the internet, of course (Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings comes to mind), who do a good job of gathering things and ideas in a way that is more reminiscent of art curators and not random Tumblrs.
I wonder about this curation trend, though, particularly because I collect various links, pictures, and writing that center around the general theme of Christianity. I do this mostly because I like having an online collection of things I find interesting, all tagged and organized and accessible from anywhere. I’ve called this a commonplace book before, and I still think that label is accurate. I doubt I’d ever call myself a curator.
But it’s interesting to watch curation become something that everyone thinks they can do, whether that be with random photo tumblrs or pinterest boards. The NYT article says,
Here’s The Awl’s co-editor, Choire Sicha, for instance, on the subject of rebloggers who fancy themselves curators: “As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it… .” To which a commenter added: “My Tumblr isn’t so much curated space as it is a symptom of deeper pathologies made manifest.”
So how do you engage in a practice of curation on Tumblr? Is it possible to go beyond aggregation and really curate? What would that look like for a tumblr (like mine) that focuses on text-heavy posts about religion?
