"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"

"Does it matter whether you hate yourself? At least love your eyes that can see, your mind that can hear the music, the thunder of the wings."

-----Robinson Jeffers


"A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things....

Friendship is another form of love -- more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these."

-----Ansel Adams, in a letter to his friend, Cedric Wright, June 10th 1937

The only true liberty is to be a slave of Christ.

"Well, but mustn't the churches adapt Christianity to suit the ideas of our time? No, they must not. Our ideas are killing us spiritually. When your child swallows poison, you don't sit around thinking of ways to adapt his constitution to a poisonous diet. You give him an emetic."

-----Joy Davidman, from "Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments"

"Sanctity too often amuses herself with poor relations."

-----Charles Williams, from "Three Plays", c. 1931

The Op-Ed by David Brooks in the NYT today said what I've been thinking for some time about the nascent popularity of tattoos. Here are some excerpts from the piece entitled Nonconformity Is Skin Deep:

"The problem is that middle-class types have been appropriating the symbols of marginalized outcasts since at least the 1830's. This is no longer a way to express individuality; it's a way to be a part of the mob. Today, fashion trends may originate on Death Row, but it takes about a week and a half for baggy jeans, slut styles and tattoos to migrate from Death Row to Wal-Mart.

What you get is a culture of trompe l'oeil degeneracy. People adopt socially acceptable transgressions---like tattoos---to show they are edgy, but inside they are still middle class. You run into these candy-cane grunge types: people with piercings and inkings all over their bodies who look like Sid Viscious but talk like Barry Manilow. They've got the alienated look---just not the anger.

And that's about the most delightful thing about the whole tattoo fad. A cadre of fashion-forward types thought that they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across the acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.

Another generation of hipsters laid low by the ironies of consumerism."

-----David Brooks, 8/27/06 NYT

"I love my church, and I'm a Catholic who was raised by intellectuals who were very devout. I was raised to believe that you could question the church and still be a Catholic. What is worthy of satire is the misuse of religion for destructive or political gains. That's totally different from the Word, the blood, the body, and the Christ. His kingdom is not of this earth."

----- Stephen Colbert

"America is a culture of mass consumerism and an ideology of privatized self fulfillment. . . .A climate of this kind is not well suited to extending American democracy to other parts of the world because it lacks the higher-order principles that serve as the foundation for morality, decency and the resolve to sacrifice self-interest for the good of others. This consumerism and privatization undermines the very institutional basis of democracy.

It is a strange time for America to take on the responsibilities of empire. A time when our own society from the family to the corporation shows signs of deep inner incoherence."

-----Robert Wuthnow, Princeton Professor of Sociology, from his speech at Vanderbilt entitled "In America, All Religions are True: Implications of the New Pluralism for Democracy"