April 2011
1 post
Love Is That Liquor
preciseandtowering:
“Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike Did set again abroach, then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as blood, but I, as wine.”
[George Herbert]
October 2010
1 post
Adiaphora: Not So Much His As Ours →
preciseandtowering:
Godly souls can gather great assurance and delight from this Sacrament; in it they have a witness of our growth into one body with Christ such that whatever is his may be called ours. As a consequence, we may dare assure ourselves that eternal life, of which he is the heir, is ours; and that the…
September 2010
2 posts
August 2010
4 posts
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a...”
– Charles Dickens (via libraryland)
alterity
libraryland:
wordjournal:
noun • /ælˈtɛrɪtɪ/ • the state of being different
June 2010
1 post
April 2010
1 post
The Delightful History of a Name: Isaac McPhee →
kristieneff:
It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving...
November 2009
1 post
October 2009
2 posts
“English is essentially what happens when you can’t decide whether the Greeks or...”
– John M. Ford, via Essentialist Explanations, “a list of 989 ‘essentialist explanations’ of the form ‘Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z’.” (via dailymeh)
“King Christ,this world is all aleak;
and lifepreservers there are none:
and...”
– e. e. cummings (via wesleyhill)
September 2009
7 posts
The Abundance of His Blessings
“We see that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ. We should therefore take care not to derive the least portion of it from anywhere else. If we seek salvation, we are taught by the very name of Jesus that it is ‘of him’. If we seek any other gifts of the Spirit, they will be found in his anointing. If we seek strength, it lies in his dominion; if...
“The name of Jesus is not only light but also food; it is also oil, without which...”
– St. Bernard
In the same flesh
Accordingly, our Lord came forth as true man and took the person and the name of Adam in order to take Adam’s place in obeying the Father, to present our flesh as the price of satisfaction to God’s righteous judgment, and, in the same flesh, to pay the penalty that we had deserved. In short, since neither as God alone could he feel death, nor as man alone could he overcome it, he...
Who else could do this?
The Mediator must be true God and true man.
This will become even clearer if we call to mind that what the Mediator was to accomplish was no common thing. His task was so to restore us to God’s grace as to make of the children of men, children of God; of the heirs of Gehenna, heirs of the Heavenly Kingdom. Who could have done this had not the selfsame Son of God become the Son of man, and...
On Achilles (and the nature of men)
whokilled:
Today in my Ancient History class we discussed an old painting depicting Julius Caesar after he had been killed. He was surrounded by, in the words of my Prof, several “women who were lamenting his death” in front of Rome. For a minute, I wanted to be Caesar. But Caesar wanted to be Alexander the Great. On one of his expeditions Caesar was marching with his army when they came upon an...
“We cannot call a fiction Christian just because there is no irreligion in it, no...”
– Ron Hansen, “Faith and Fiction.” A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction (2001) (via tilling)
“Whenever someone says “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart”, all I hear is...”
– From the blog post “Random thoughts from 25-35 year olds,” (here) (via thepoptimist)
August 2009
16 posts
“A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level,...”
– L. E. Sissman, quoted here (via ayjay) (via wesleyhill)
“… to think as a Christian is to try to understand the stellar spaces, the...”
– Nicholas Lash (via wesleyhill)
“WHO AM I?” Who am I? They often tell me
I would step from my cell’s confinement...”
– » Dietrich Bonhoeffer, cited at We Know, Because He First Knew Us (7) | the harvard ichthus (via preciseandtowering)
To Our Immense Dismay and Terror
preciseandtowering:
“In its purposiveness as love, therefore,the holiness of the Father includes jealousy. ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God’ (Exod. 20.5). God’s jealousy is his creative will in its singularity and exclusiveness. But as such it is not mere self-assertion. It is the energy of God’s good will with which he directs himself in all his works and ways towards us. The jealousy of...
a DFW quote, via Kottke →
wesleyhill:
“The really important kind of freedom,’ said Wallace, ‘involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom… The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some...
“‘Just as we are all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all,...”
– So glad to see Brian Appleyard quoting this — it’s from W. H. Auden’s A Certain World: a Commonplace Book, and I’ve cited this passage about eight times in books and essays over the years. (via ayjay)
Parade Magazine & The Poet Laureate
puffalump:
[from the August 9 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Parade Magazine, PersonalityParade section:] Q: Why are my tax dollars going to pay a poet laureate when nobody reads poetry? Jeff Kawabata, Omaha, Neb. A: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of wha is found there,” wrote the great American poet William Carlos Williams. (We hope...
Failing And Flying
puffalump:
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of...
“Christianity draws a distinction between what is frivolous and what is serious,...”
– Auden (via wesleyhill)
“One of Sour, Two of Sweet, Three of Strong, Four of Weak. This is a baseline...”
– the philosophy of cocktails (via ayjay)
July 2009
7 posts
The lesson of the moth
viz:
i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had been an uncovered candle instead of an electric light bulb you would now be a small unsightly cinder have you no sense plenty of it he answered but at times we...
“This great project, theology, which for so many centuries was the epitome of...”
– Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, 182.
[at “Modernity’s incurious muffling of theology” « Per Crucem ad Lucem]
(via preciseandtowering)
“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the...”
– Buzz Aldrin, as told to Eric Metaxas, via Culture Making (via ayjay) (via preciseandtowering)
“Christian theology speaks about mercy, but does so by speaking about Jesus...”
– « John Webster, chapel at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (via preciseandtowering)
“The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the...”
– Dr. Seuss (via bookshelves)
June 2009
15 posts
“Osteen reflects the broader assumption among evangelicals that we are saved by...”
– Michael S. Horton, here
“E.L. Doctorow once said that ‘writing a novel is like driving a car at night....”
– Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird (Via) (via thepoptimist)
“I know not what I appear to the world, but to myself, I seem to have been only...”
– Isaac Newton
A bird among the rain-wet lilacs sings—
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
-Wilfred Wilson Gibson, “Lament”