Pithy quotes from our current reading which give us pause to reflect

Faith & Science Conversation
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Here is another snippet from the same poem from part 6 I like even more.

Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

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I’m listening to “The Death of Expertise,” by Tom Nichols, on Audible lately. It reminds me a lot of “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”

When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise. Emotion is an unassailable defense against expertise, a moat of anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly drown. And when students learn that emotion trumps everything else, it is a lesson students will take with them the rest of their lives. Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what is true and what is false.

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It’s kind of amazing that people do not realize how unreliable emotions are, and how poor a standard. (That is not an advocacy for stoicism. ; - )

The heart is deceitful above all things…

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Just dabbling in Lewis quotes, I came across this, which happens to be both underlined and highlighted in my copy of the book:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.

– C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory.” In The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962, 1965), 39-40.

I probably have a marginal note or two on that as well (I remember thinking over and over as I read anything at all by Lewis that the publishers should have made an edition with extra-wide margins for people like myself and my sister who can’t avoid making notes right there in the book).

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Providence is God’s love in action, written in facts.1

I may have to get this:
https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Providence-Spurgeon-Gods-Action-ebook/dp/B08JHSWQZS

The providence of God is given by hands of love and goodness, and it is the antidote to all fears, both large and small. The love and goodness in action in the life of an individual sustain and preserve the life. We are to watch the direction of the hands, to move when we are told to, and to wait when we have to…

These sermons encourage us to admire God’s hand in the lives of His servants and trace His goodness and enabling in our own lives, reflecting on His love in action.

 

1 (Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary ; - )

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Tidbit from my transcript of the interview with N.T. Wright regarding his book Broken Signposts.

  • “And will I be free to choose evil? Well, if you’re choosing evil, you’re not ultimately free. If you’re worshiping the God in whose image you’re made, then your freedom consists of becoming more and more genuinely God-reflectingly human, And the thought of choosing evil in that context would be a way of saying “I don’t like this freedom thing. I want to go back into a horrid little box and just grab around at the bottom of it there.” So we need to take our ideas of freedom and choice and, indeed, of evil and rethink them in the light of what new creation as heaven and earth, as a Temple with an image in it–back to the Temple again. Humans are made to be the image within the Temple; the Temple is the new heavens and new earth, and when we are fully bearing God’s image, worshiping the one in whose image we’re made. we will be utterly free. As Jesus says: : “If the Son makes you free, you’ll be really free”, and you won’t ask “Please, can I go and do something else now?” because you’ll be doing the thing you most want to do.”
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“There are two kinds of hope: There’s the kind that dies last; and there’s the kind that never dies.” Source: me.

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Huh. That sounds familiar, maybe a living hope, not just empty wishful thinking? Arminian-ish Christians have difficulty with this though: A Christian’s Confidence.

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On Campus Crusade for Christ in my university days some guys did a skit where they used the “We Are Family” song slightly re-written:

We are family
Get up everybody and sing
We are family
Got all my brothers and my sisters with me

I don’t remember what they did with the verses, but the ending was “Come on join the family!”

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Have discovered another kindred spirit thanks to my friend Rob, Karen Armstrong. A former Catholic nun whose conception of God closely mirrors my own. It has always struck me as off the mark to envision God as an entity in His own right. And He doesn’t have to be treated as human-like in order to be treated with rightful respect. God is responsible both for what is high and what is lowly and all is part of the reality we are given. From Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World (p. 11). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.:

“The essence of [the] “participatory” understanding of the natural world did not die with the arrival of civilisation. It would be expressed differently in each culture, but until the advent of Western modernity, it remained substantially similar across the world. We will see that people in early civilisations did not experience the power that governed the cosmos as a supernatural, distant and distinct “God.” It was rather an intrinsic presence that they, like the nineteenth-century shaman, experienced in ritual and contemplation—a force imbuing all things, a transcendent mystery that could never be defined.”

No box is big enough.

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How Trump Got Evangelicals to Make a Deal with the Devil (w/ Tim Alberta)

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I’ve got that in my video queue.

It’s hard to pick good videos any more, there’s so much click-bait garbage on youtube these days, so I’ve been hesitant to watch it.

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This is a heart breaking piece of poetry I recall by Ben Jonson, from my highschool days. I’ve run into cases of death of children more lately. It was so much more common back prior to 1900, when 50% of all children died before the age of 5–that the amount of death stuns me.

It reminds me, however, that the amount of death does not change the value of a single being.

Thanks.

On my First Son

BY BEN JONSON

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.

Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon 'scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, "Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry."

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

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Michael Wear quoting T.S. Elliot in a recent Holy Post podcast interview…

The human endeavor has been to try to create a system so perfect that men no longer need to be good. … that using structures and policies and right answers, we could some how evade the kind of people we are. You’re never going to get around the kind of person you are. Jesus is actually most concerned with the kind of person you’re becoming, not with the systems you have in place, the presentation you have, the outside of the cup.

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Excellent and that fits so well with this quote which I just heard the author, Karen Armstrong say on a YouTube video.

“Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:
Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, ‘Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah’ (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.”
― Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

The video: https://youtu.be/2T1zBj3K50U?si=2O_nvfhJakiVTul_

Hmmm … does it really fit so well with your quote? Perhaps only in that in both there is an implied injunction about sewing up your world view so tight that you can no longer respond to anything afresh. What can be written down is complete, but life is not complete. Not after 70 or 100 years. What experience we may have and what we gather from that is always just a small bit of a large sea.

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“Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”

–“The Fellowship of the Ring.”

I wonder if that’s a sign of wisdom–maybe one in a careful scientist, too?

Thanks.

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I looked up that quote, which she quoted in the interview, but I couldn’t find it in the book. In the interview, it is said that she has written three books on Islam, and I only have two, so perhaps she used it somewhere, just not in that book, which interestingly has the title “The Battle for God” on the UK paperback version from 2001. For me, the important thing she said in the interview was that there were three things that she thought important for Muslims to know:

  1. the importance of ritual as well as just doctrines … people learn, I think, not about religion, not just by learning facts or reading scriptures, but ritual and behaviour change your mind. I think one of the first things the prophet did, peace be upon him, was to advise his people who came to see him pray, to prostrate themselves five times a day, and this was very uncongenial to the Arabs, who were at this point very pleased with themselves because they were doing frightfully in Mecca economically, and that they were strong fighters and had strong opinions, but they were being asked to grovel on the ground like a slave and we learn a great deal. Our actual knowledge comes from how we behave, act, and move our bodies. These prostrations were one of the first things that the Quraish, the aristocrats of Mecca, were astonished at and recognised the emptiness and littleness of themselves. I think that that is one of the great things about Islam: they’re constantly practising kenosis, as they call it in Greek, which means emptying, an emptying of self, and we do learn that not just by doctrines or abstruse conversations, but from our bodies. So, I think that that was one of the first things that drew me to Islam.
  2. The extraordinary beauty of the Quran itself, to which she gave an example of relatively secular Muslims becoming silent when the Quran was recited.
  3. The quote by Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240): “Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, ‘Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah’ (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.”

In “The Battle for God,” she portrays Islam as a typical pre-modern society that looked to the past to understand “the way things are” and how they should consequently be, and that with the Enlightenment, there grew animosity against such thinking and antisemitic thinking grew larger then, but also scepticism towards Christianity and Islam. The approach that we have since taken in the West is, therefore, clearly opposed to Islamic thinking and is seen as desecrating the sacred. This is obviously not just an Islamic view, but Christians tend to have a duplicitous relationship with the sacred, insomuch that they apply exclusivity to their own traditions and scriptures, and not so much acceptance of others.

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  • LOL! You should have posted that message in the Humor in Science and Theology thread.
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I hope you are still laughing when the elections in 2024 are over …