Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Pessimism is an attitude that may look brave—and I think this is really quite interesting—because there are certain people who propose it with a rather macho stance, you know: ‘I’m tough enough to see the facts!’ But it’s actually a very cowardly way of dealing with the world. Because if you only think that things…
“The Christian hope that is “not seen” is a communion in the agony of Christ. It is the identification of our own agonia with the agonia of the God Who emptied himself and became obedient unto death. It is the acceptance of life in the midst of death, not because we have courage, or light,…
If you perceive the universe as being a universe of abundance, then it will be. If you think of the universe as one of scarcity, then it will be. And I never thought of the universe as one of scarcity. I always thought that there was enough of everything to go around–that there are enough…
We thought that we overcame racism in the 60’s; we thought the church overcame triumphalism at Vatican II, and now forty years later we are right back into this regressive and dualistic thinking all over again. This is the nature of the ego if we have not formed a contemplative mind, a big mind, that…
Not that love dispenses with knowing or requires some sacrifice of intelligibility, but love becomes, instead of and in the place of intuitus, the keeper of evidence, the royal road to knowledge: “When speaking of things human, we say that we should know them before loving them—a saying which has become proverbial. Yet the saints,…
I am at an interesting place right now in regard to thinking about the subject of sin. After hearing sermon after sermon on the subject, reading book after book, having conversation after conversation, I’m convinced of pretty much one thing: For me, the biggest problem that human beings have with sin, is that we try…
This is a developing thought that has influences which are vast. It’s the kind of idea that rattles around with no place to go. So I thought I’d share it, no matter how incoherent it may be. The idea is simple: I’m not afraid to be a hypocrite. It’s true that traditionally, being hypocritical is…
What theology needs is more copulation. And postmodern theopoetics may well provide it. The word copulation, of course, denotes coupling: the bringing together and/or union of two things. The related words “copula” and “copulative” are grammatical terms, used to describe the linking of elements in a sentence. How unfortunate, then, that the fertile term copulation…
The husband wants to be taken back into the family after behaving terribly, but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud. Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed so…
“Papists”, wrote English Protestant Nicholas Lesse in 1550, “although they were right nought for the soul, yet were they good and profitable for the body for civil commonwealths, for the maintenance of civil justice, and all good politic orders. But as for these [Anabaptists] they are neither good for the body nor for the soul:…