Marilynne Robinson makes that point as well in her book Reading Genesis, pointing out how God cares for all mankind, and pointing out that Hagar is the first person in the Bible visited by an angel, as a bit of trivia.
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Nailed it.
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Popping my head in because I was just reading the poetry of St. John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz, which sounds more normal in Spanish than in English), and I wanted to share one of my faves. He predates the Reformation and is still considered one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language. Anyway, the English translation followed by the Spanish, to give a sense of the rhythm and rhyme. @Christy might enjoy this one.
EL PASTORCICO
I
Un pastorcico solo está penado
ageno de plazer y de contento
y en su pastora puesto el pensamiento
y el pecho del amor muy lastimado.
II
No llora por averle amor llagado
que no le pena verse así affligido
aunque en el coraçón está herido
mas llora por pensar que está olbidado.
III
Que sólo de pensar que está olbidado
de su vella pastora con gran pena
se dexa maltratar en tierra agena
el pecho del amor muy lastimado!
IV
Y dize el pastorcito: ¡Ay desdichado
de aquel que de mi amor a hecho ausencia
y no quiere gozar la mi presencia
y el pecho por su amor muy lastimado!
V
Y a cavo de un gran rato se a encumbrado
sobre un árbol do abrió sus braços vellos
y muerto se a quedado asido dellos
el pecho del amor muy lastimado.
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“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
Dorothy Sayers
(As quoted in ‘The Myth of Good Christian Parenting‘)
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Wow, is that applicable to the current situation in the U.S.!
It reminds me of a notice posted in multiple places on the local community college campus telling Latinos how to respond if ICE hassles them; one thing it emphasizes is that they are not “brown people”, they are valued individuals.
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We have been reading “The Hiding Place,” by Corrie Ten Boom, with the kids at night. I’m struck by the godliness of Corrie and her family–her sister, Betsy, prayed for peace as the Germans bombed them, but also for the German pilots, who she described as confused young men, entrapped by a horrible regime.
When Corrie and her father saw Jews being loaded on to the back of a truck, she cried, “Oh, Father! Those poor people!” In reponse her father said, “Yes, those poor people, the Germans–for they have touched the apple of God’s eye.”
We learned that her father fired only one person in his 60 years as a watchmaker–a member of the Nazi party who treated an old employee shamefully, because of the Nazi ideology of treating the elderly and others as useless to society . Even then, he tried to remonstrate with him. In response, the man gazed at the whole family with extreme contempt as he left.
It is a great text for us to remember and study virtue.
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“…the purpose of a university education: to cause reflection, not be a reflection.”
-Greg Lukianoff
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That’s super!
“Jesus is victorious over violence not because he rules with the sword, but because the sword does not rule him.”
Phuc Luu in “Jesus of the East”
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