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

Faith & Science Conversation
2826

I presume that by “our society” it is the U.S. that is meant.

This is something I point to as why there is more violent behavior of all types on this side of the Atlantic. It’s common to see the Puritan heritage as legalism, but it’s more than that: it’s the insistence on being right and on winning, and anger is intimately tied to both those in the American view.

That’s because we have to “win”, which means that anyone standing in the way of our concept of victory must be “enemy”. Often in U.S. history it’s been an open question whether our willingness to include will win out over our compulsion to exclude.

True that.

2827

Based on what does well for Hollywood I’ve noticed many more movie trailers involving plot lines where people are wronged and spend the rest of the movie mercilessly hunting down and exacting grizzly revenge on all involved. Movies involving recognizing where one has done wrong and seek atonement or to make restitution very rare.

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2828

Yeah - and TV series too. We may have shows like “The Equalizer” - but could you ever imagine any successful series named, “The Blesser” or “The Redeemer”!? I guess there is “The Chosen” - which is all those things, but it’s special.

I don’t usually post much in the way of quotation from the Tao, but I really liked this one that a friend brought up to me the other day:

I have three treasures which I hold and keep.
The first is mercy; the second is economy;
The third is daring not to be ahead of others.
From mercy comes courage; from economy comes generosity;
From humility comes leadership.

Nowadays men shun mercy, but try to be brave;
They abandon economy, but try to be generous;
They do not believe in humility, but always try to be first.
This is certain death.

Mercy brings victory in battle and strength in defense.
It is the means by which heaven saves and guards.

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2829

Having off-shored my God interest to a different thread I’d like to share something lighter and pass on a recommendation for a novel I am now trying not to finish until we have our two nights in Fort Bragg, The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. Though there is an odd mission that sends our piano tuning hero across the globe to tune a piano for an eccentric and, so far, mysterious army doctor who got the English army to ship a grand piano to him in Burma and then carry it by elephant to where he is stationed. I know, I’m curious as all get out to find out more about that too. But, having gobbled up the first few chapters, I am inclined to describe it as a love story between two people who are married to each other. Weird, I know. @Kendel

I require the characters be ones I can care about in a book I like. So far, so good. Here are two short passages I found charming. The first from p 29 and the second from p 41.

Their servant, a young girl from Whitechapel, had returned home to tend her mother, who was sick with consumption, so Katherine left the table to arrange the bedroom. She usually stayed at home during the day, to help with the chores, to receive house calls from Edgar’s clients, to arrange commissions, and to plan social affairs, a task which her husband who had always felt more comfortable among musical instruments, was more than happy to let her manage. They had no children, although not for lack of trying. Indeed, their marriage had stayed quite amorous, a fact that sometimes surprised even Katherine when she watched her husband wander abasentmindedly through the house. While at first this notable Absence-of-Child, as Katherine’s mother described it, had saddened the two of them, they had become accustomed to it, and Katherine often wondered if it had made them closer. Besides, Katherine at times admitted to her friends a certain relief, Edgar is enough to look after.

Seagulls cried, waiting for discarded food, calling to each others they circled. Edgar and
Katherine walked along the shore. As they turned away from the river and began their return, Edgar’s fingers wrapped around those of his wife. A tuner makes a good husband, she had told her friends after they returned from their honeymoon. He knows how to listen, and his touch is more delicate than that of the pianist; only the tuner knows the inside of the piano. The young women had giggled at the scandalous implications of those words. Now, eighteen years later, she knew where the calluses on his hands lay and what they were from. Once he had explained them to her like a tattooed man explaining the stories of his illustrations, …

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2830

Be careful who you marry, Mark. It might last.

This sounds like a wonderful novel. Indeed charming.

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2831

We just celebrated our Fourth of July, as my sister and brother were not in town for July 4th. Having strong appreciation for non American heritage (having grown up overseas) and our family being of mixed heritage, I’ve been mulling Rich Mullins’ poetic song, “Land of My Sojourn,” lately. It really appeals to any country we live as a place we can love, find echoes of God’s reaching out to us, and a reminder that our real home is Heaven

For the tune: Land Of My Sojourn (youtube.com)

Land Of My Sojourn

Song by

Rich Mullins

And the coal trucks come a-runnin’
With their bellies full of coal,
And their big wheels a-hummin’

Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman
Who hid the spies who were lookin’
For the land of the milk and the honey.

And this road, she is a woman,
She was made from a rib
Cut from the sides of these mountains,

Oh, these great sleeping Adams,
Who are lonely, even here, in Paradise
Lonely for somebody to kiss 'em,

And I’ll sing my song ~ and I’ll sing my song
In the land of my sojourn.

And the lady in the harbor,
She still holds her torch out
To those huddled masses who are

Yearning for a freedom,
That still eludes them,
The immigrant’s children see their brightest dreams shattered

Here on the New Jersey shoreline, in the
Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos
But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral,

And they stoop in the silence
And there their prayers are still whispered.

And I’ll sing their song, and I’ll sing their song
In the land of my sojourn

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here.

So, I’ll call you my country,
And I’ll be lonely for my home,
And I wish that I could take you there with me.

And down the brown brick spine
Of some dirty blind alley
All those drain pipes are drippin’ out

The last Sons Of Thunder,
While off in the distance, the smokestacks
Were belching back this city’s best answer

And the countryside was pocked
With all of those Mail Pouch posters
Thrown up on the rotting sideboards

Of these rundown stables,
Like the one that Christ was born in,
When the old world started dying,
And the new world started coming on,

And I’ll sing His song, and I’ll sing His song
In the land of my sojourn

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2832

Very nice. This part was easiest for me to find my way into having not done much sojourning.

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2833

Thanks. It’s one of my favorite parts, too.

2834

Well it has been an awfully long time since I’ve shared a video of an interview with Iain McGIlchrist. As some of you know the argument in his book The Matter With Things is what led me to realize how our modern mindset has squeezed out religion and a regard for the sacred for so many people, formerly myself included. I now find “God” a perfectly good way to refer to that which cannot possibly be caught in ordinary language, what I’d always referred to as the ‘something greater’ within. I now realize it isn’t just within but it is certainly there too.

The interviewer is Justin Brierley who had been part of another British Christian podcast, “Unbelievable” I believe it was called. Frankly he rubbed me the wrong way with his combative reliance on debate as in the time he interviewed Myron B. Penner on his book The End Of Apologetics which some of us discussed here. In that interview I found him to be outright hostile to Penner, shutting him down rather than drawing him out. But now Brierley is involved in other podcast/websites including this one.

I can’t summarize or evaluate it yet as I’ve only just begun watching and listening to it, but given the title of the talk I thought there might be some interest in it here. If you respond to this post and wish to discuss it I would be delighted to join you.

Just finished with it. I do believe it would be more satisfying to many of you than other such interviews as the hosts do strongly drive the conversation toward God, faith and belief. Toward the end a link to another episode opens, one with a professor Karen Swallow Prior called How To Reenchant Evangelicalism. Haven’t begun listening and not sure if/when I will. But it is an interesting idea. I think it must have to do with getting beyond the legalism of theology to something deeper which seems valuable to me.

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2835

Well @Kendel might remember when I announced my intention to take a look at the book The Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf. But it didn’t take long for me to decide it wasn’t for me. Don’t think I started with the prologue that time, more eager to hear about particular historical figures of that time period. Eager for a story with compelling characters. Had I started here instead my interest would have fixated on the perspective of the author as it has now. A sample:

From the prologue of Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wolf, pp 2-4

Every single day of my life. I write. I tell stories. I try to make sense of the past so that I can learn something about the present. I am lucky. Incredibly lucky. It could have all gone horribly wrong. But it didn’t. Until now, I have had the privilege of having lived my life. I’m also very aware. That it might not always remain like this.

There have been times when my ferocious appetite for independence became egotistical. I’m sure my daughter would have preferred not to move as frequently as we did. But despite these upheavals, she turned out to be a beautiful human being. And I became an adult as I grew up with her. That little girl grounded me and anchored my determination to be free into something bigger: to be a good person. She enabled me to find a balance between being free spirited and being responsible.

We live in a world in which we tiptoe along a thin line between free will and selfishness, between self-determination and narcissism, between empathy and righteousness. Underpinning everything are two crucial questions: Who am I as an individual? And who am I as a member of a group and society? …

For most of my adult life, I have been tryin to understand why we are who we are. This is the reason why I write history books. In my previous books, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature in order to understand why we’ve destroyed so much of our magnificent blue planet. But I realize that it is not enough to look at the connections between us and nature. The first step is to look at us as individuals - when did we begin to be as selfish as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we think it was our right to take what we wanted? Where did this - us, you, me or our collective behavior - all come from? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?

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2836

Magnificent preface!

I like the way she describes this as a thin line. Her formation of that last couplet is eye-opening. I want to argue against it. “Righteousness is a good thing!” But I see righteousness of all kinds play out in the least humane ways possible all the time. Because often, righteousness has nothing to do with humanity, quite the opposite in fact.

Again, she does a good job recognizing that something good – being free – isn’t so good after all, when it pays no attention to the collective, or even other individuals.

I hope the rest of the book is as good as the preface.

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2837

So do I. The rest of the prologue is pretty good though it is harder to pick out pithy soundbites because of the amount of historical detail involved. But it has moments only those who ride it our will know. Not sure yet if I’ll be one of those but I’ll find out.

2838

I’m particularly interested in Goethe from whom I have read many thoughtful quotes. Schiller and the others I shall find out about.

From p32 of Chapter I ‘A happy event’
Summer 1794: Goethe and Schilling

“Goethe …sketched a plant with a few strokes to elaborate how he understood botany. Behind variety was unity, Goethe explained, as each plant was the variation of a primordial form. He had observed that the leaf of a plant was this basic form from which all others developed - the petals, the calyx, roots and so on. ‘Forwards and backwards the plant is always the leaf,’ he had written in his diary after a visit to the botanical garden in Padua during his travels in Italy a few years previously. Goethe’s thinking was wrong, Shiller objected after carefully listening. This was not an observation from experience, it was ‘an idea’.

With this one comment, Shiller summarised the differences in their thinking and how they fundamentally disagreed on how to make sense of the world. Goethe described himself as a hard-headed realist, as someone who gained knowledge through the observation of nature. Shiller, by contrast, called himself an ‘idealist’. Inspired by his intense study of Kant’s philosophy, Shiller believed that our knowledge of so-called reality was perceived through the existing categories in our mind - such as time, space and causality. Goethe insisted that he had come to the conclusion by looking at plants - an empirical and scientific approach - while Shiller said the ‘idea of a leaf’ had existed already in Goethe’s mind. Goethe ‘gets too much from the world of the senses’, Shiller had told a friend, ‘whereas I get things from the soul’.

The discussion was combative but also inspiring, and both agreed that neither had won the argument. The competition between realism and idealism, between object and subject, Goethe later said, was the foundation on which they sealed their connection and he admitted to not having had so much ‘intellectual pleasure’ for a long time. The day marked the beginning of the most fruitful literary friendship of the age.”

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2839

That’s a beautiful quote.

My mom sent us kids a quote a couple of years ago–something about “freedom is the ability to best serve my neighbor.”

Thanks.

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2840

Fascinating contrast! And yet, they both help define the German Romantic movement. The cultural power and staying power of it can’t be overstated.

2841

It made me think about what IM talks about as the coincidence of opposites, though it isn’t original to him. Obviously Goethe and Schiller each brought something different and apparently opposed but expressed it in such a way that the other could appreciate its validity and that served as a catalyst for each to further discover and express his own understanding. It reinforces for me that the truth isn’t a zero sum game in which ideas compete to reign as king of the hill. Rather, the truth is vast and expressible in many forms. One way or another will call to one as one’s own. But the existence of other forms of expression is not only not the enemy but can potentially even serve as a catalyst for deepening one’s appreciation of the truth in whatever form one knows it.

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2842

I’ve been listening to C S Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters”–

“Once you have made the world an end, and faith the means, you have very nearly won your man”–an elder demon advises his nephew tempter, Wormwood.

Not to target one political movement–in fact, that would be to miss the whole point!–but The Gospel Coalition has an apt quote of his broader passage here.

80 Years Ago C. S. Lewis Warned Against Making Faith a Means to a Political End (thegospelcoalition.org)

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2843

Certainly appropriate to our day.

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2845

“Modesty is just arrogance by stealth.”

-Lobsang (AI character in “The Long Earth” by Pratchett and Baxter)

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2846

I was just sharing some quotes from here to another forums and came across these again. You two are very good at internalizing blame even that of other people though that deserves no brag.

Why do the correct people never feel convicted while those who are blameless feel it for them?

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