"Around 1965, I went to church and heard a priest describe Vietnam as a holy war. That's when I walked out. Something told me he's dead wrong."

-----Martin Scorsese, from Rolling Stone interview (40th Anniversary edition)

Why we continue to ascribe God's name to ventures that run counter to His explicitly stated desires is beyond me. I wonder how many others have shut the door on God for similar reasons?

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy."

-----Czeslaw Milosz, from "The Captive Mind"

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though , but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathesome, an insect on a dead thing."

-----David Foster Wallace, from the essay "Consider The Lobster" in "Consider The Lobster"

"We come here from Georgia. Our family did. Horse and wagon. I pretty much know that for a fact. I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain ain't so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth can't compete. But I don't believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talking about. I've heard it compared to the rock--maybe in the bible--and I wouldn't disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe."

-----Cormac McCarthy, "No Country for Old Men" (Sherriff Bell monologue)


"In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped and shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all."

-----Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

-----W.H. Auden

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

-----Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech in Washington, April 16, 1953

"I ask you! [Lewis] put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning, and said he was 'going short for Lent.'"

-----J.R.R. Tolkien forcefully responding to an article in the Daily Telegraph that characterized his friend C.S. Lewis as the "ascetic Mr. Lewis."

"I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God's existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existant address. Mind you I don't think so--the whole of my reasonable mind is convinced: but I often feel so. However, there is nothing to do but to peg away. One falls so often that it hardly seems worth while picking oneself up and going through the farce of starting over again as if you could ever hope to walk. Still, this seeming absurdity is the only sensible thing I do, so I must continue it."

-----C.S. Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, (24 December 1930)

"To interpret the Bible truly, then, we must do more than string together individual propositions like beads on a string. This takes us only as far as fortune cookie theology, to a practice of breaking open Scripture in order to find the message contained within. What gets lost in propositionalist interpretation are the circumstances of the statement, its poetic and affective elements, and even, then, a dimension of its truth. We do less than justice to Scripture if we preach and teach only its propositional content. Information alone is insufficient for spirital formation. We need to get beyond 'cheap innerancy,' beyond ascribing accolades to the Bible to understanding what the Bible is actually saying, beyond professing biblical truth to practicing it."

-----Kevin J. Vanhoozer, from "Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and Hermeneutics" in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (March 2005)

Three cheers for the new democratic congress signing off on unprecedented debt relief and benefits packages for Africa. You can read about it here. Finally someone is funding Bush's commitment!

The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it. They have ended in the flesh because they began in it, and the fruit of their anxious asceticism is that they "use things not," but do so as if they used them.

In their very self-denial they defile themselves with what they pretend to avoid. They do not have the pleasure they seek, but they taste the bitter discouragement, the feeling of guilt which they would like to escape. This is not the way of the spirit. For when our intention is directed to God, our very use of material things sanctifies both them and us, provided we use them without selfishness or presumption, glad to receive them from Him who loves us and whose love is all we desire."

-----Thomas Merton, "No Man Is An Island"

According to the "Which Big Lebowski character are you?" quiz:

Why don't you check it out? Or we cut off your Johnson!

"By the very cogent anthropology of Judeo-Christianity, whether or not one agreed with it, human existence was by no means to be understood as the transaction of a higher organism satisfying this or that need from its environment---by being 'creative' or enjoying 'meaningful relationships'--- but as the journey of a wayfarer along life's way. The experience of alienation was thus not a symptom of maladaption (psychology) nor evidence of the absurdity of life (existentialism) nor an inevitable consequence of capitalism (Marx) nor the necessary dehumanization of technology (Ellul). Though the exacerbating influence of these forces was not denied, it was not to be forgotten that human alienation was first and last the homelessness of man who is not in fact at home.

The Judeo-Christian anthropology was cogent enough, too, to accommodate the several topical alienations of the twentieth century. The difficulty was that in order to accept this anthropology of alienation one had also to accept the notion of an aboriginal catastrophe or Fall, a stumbling block which to both the scientist and the humanist seems even more bizarre than a theology of God, the Jews, Christ, and the Church.

So the scientists and humanists got rid of the Fall and re-entered Eden, where scientists know like angels, and laymen prosper in good environments, and ethical democracies progress through education. But in so doing they somehow deprived themselves of the means of understanding and averting the dread catastrophes which were to overtake Eden and of dealing with those perverse and ungrateful beneficiaries of science and ethics who preferred to eat lotus like the Laodiceans or roam the dark and violent world like Ishmael or Cain.

Then Eden turned into the twentieth century."

-----Walker Percy, from "The Delta Factor", in "The Message in the Bottle."

"Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind. . . . Of [such] philosophies it is strictly true that their followers work in spite of them, or do not work at all. No skeptics work skeptically; no fatalists work fatalistically; all without exception work on the principle that it is possible to assume what it is not possible to believe. No materialist who thinks his mind was made up for him by mud and blood and heredity, has any hesitation in making up his mind. No skeptic who believes truth is subjective has any hesitation about treating it as objective."

-----G. K. Chesterton, "St. Thomas Acquinas: The Dumb Ox"

"Only Jesus himself is the truth, the whole story of him. He will not let us settle for any truth less than that, tidier than that, easier than that. And the truth seems to be that if he is indeed everybody's best friend the way the old Jesus hymns proclaim, he is at the same time everybody's worst enemy. He is the enemy, at least, of everything in us that keeps us from giving him what he is really after. And what he is really after is our heart's blood, our treasure, our selves themselves. It is the cross he is inviting us to, not a Sunday school picnic, and therefore it is proper to rejoice in his presence, it is proper also to be scared stiff in his presence.

He tells us not to be this or that, but to be his. Not to follow this way or that way, but to follow him. He promises to give us everything and in return asks us to give up everything the way he himself gave up everything---that is his story. And only then the miracle that not even all our tragic and befuddled history has ever quite managed to destroy. Only then the miracle of you and me not just talking about him two thousand years later but holding on to him for dear life, believing from time to time that he is the one the one we draw dear life from, dearest life. That is his story too, and of course it is also our story.

Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn't mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice. Only never take your choice too easily, of course. Never assume that because you have taken it one way today, you may not take it another way tomorrow."

-----Frederick Buechner, from "The Truth of Stories"

"Jesus Christ is too important to be left to the theologians."

"Everybody else is an expert on the present. I wish to file a minority report on behalf of the past."

"Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."

-----Jaroslav Pelican 1923-2006

"Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it."

"Every philosophy consists of certain and uncertain knowledge, of idealism and realism, of sensuousness and deductions. Why should only the uncertain be called belief? "

-----Johann Georg Hamann, from "Kleeblatt Hellenistischer Briefe"

"The majority [of people today] are left with their two poor values of personal peace and affluence. With such values, will men stand for their liberties? Will they not give up their liberties step by step, inch by inch, as long as their own personal peace and prosperity is sustained and not challenged, and as long as the goods are delivered?

And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals--increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth--but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.

Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor; third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome."

-----Francis A. Schaeffer, from "How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought Culture" circa 1976

"Many problems are now reserved for an ecumenical council. It would be better to defer questions of this sort to the time when no longer in a glass darkly we see God face to face....

Formerly, faith was in life rather than in the profession of creeds. Presently, necessity required that articles be drawn up, but only a few with Apostolic sobriety. Then the depravity of the heretics exacted a more precise scrutiny of the divine books....

When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, then there were almost as many faiths as men. Articles increased and sincerity decreased. Contention grew hot and love grew cold. The doctrine of Christ, which at first knew no hairsplitting, came to depend on the aid of philosophy. This was the first stage in the fall of the church....

The injection of the authority of the emperor into this affair did not greatly aid the sincerity of the faith....

When faith is in the mouth rather than in the heart, when the solid knowledge of Sacred Scripture fails us, nevertheless by terrorization we drive men to believe what they do not believe, to love what they do not love, to know what they do not know. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ."

-----Desiderius Erasmus, from his preface to Hilary

I think it's one of the last great ironies that the conservatives are appropriating 1950's lit-department philosophy and turning it back on the liberals, essentially beating them at their own game with their own philosophy. It's all very Chestertonian. . .Colbert's comment below says it all.

“Language has always been important in politics, but language is incredibly important to the present political struggle,” Colbert says. “Because if you can establish an atmosphere in which information doesn’t mean anything, then there is no objective reality. The first show we did, a year ago, was our thesis statement: What you wish to be true is all that matters, regardless of the facts. Of course, at the time, we thought we were being farcical.”

-----Stephen Colbert, from an interview with New York Magazine


"The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting point of their argument....if it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can make one or two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat."

-----G.K. Chesterton, from "Orthodoxy"