“Very different is the monastic way. Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet they alone constitute the way to real and true freedom: I cut away my superfluous and unnecessary needs, through obedience I humble and chasten my vain and proud will, and thereby, with God’s help, attain freedom of spirit, and with that,…
Category
Art
Killing is sooo Primitive
The latest news about this guy from Colorado who claims he was obeying an order from God to hunt Osama Bin Laden and avenge the 9/11 attatcks makes me truly sad. What’s worse is that the man claims to be a devout Christian and was in possesion of “Christian literature” (among other things like swords…
Masters of The Universe Art
I stumbled upon this awesome blog post (via notcot) all about a Masters of The Universe tribute Art Show that took place at some undetermined location and date. Growing up with He-Man as I did, I am a huge MoTU fan, so I thought I would post some of my favorite pieces here. This one…
July 4th, 2011: Happy St. Elizabeth of Portugal Day!!
Born in 1271, Queen Isabel was married to King Diniz (or Dinis). Like her great-aunt Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, for whom she was named, Saint Elizabeth of Portugal dedicated her life to the poor. She established orphanages and provided shelter for the homeless. She also founded a convent in Coimbra. Read more about Saint Elizabeth…
Social Justic vs. Divine Justice
That biblical vision of a world-for-all did not come from our modern ideas of democratic power or our contemporary claims about human or civil rights. It did not come from liberalism, socialism, or communism. In recognizing its challenge we are not retrojecting any of that modernity back onto antiquity. A world-for-all came, if one needs…
Kings vs. bookish men, vowed to celibacy and destitute of armed force.
The king had to share his power with the feudal aristocracy, but all alike expected to be allowed occasional outbursts of passion in the form of war, murder, pillage, or rape. Monarchs might repent, for they were sincerely pious, and, after all, repentance itself was a form of passion. But the church could never produce…
Reading Plato While Wearing a Walkman | Art by Matthew Rangel
You have argued that new technologies are a threat to the “silence” and “intimacy” necessary for an encounter with great works… Yes, the quality of silence is organically linked to the quality of language. You and I are sitting here, in this house surrounded by a garden, where there is no other noise other than…
Much Fear and Trembling
What Luther discovered, which we too often hide from, is the theological and existential discovery that God is crucified, that the monster takes God, that death and separation destroy God. And this is not to be celebrated, but despaired. Just like Paul, we are in much fear and trembling. For Luther, like Nietzsche, God is…
In case you didn’t know, faith and reason are NOT in conflict. | Art by Jordan Kasey
Albert Einstein once famously stated that “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” I for one agree with him completely. Religion and science, regardless of what you read about in the newspapers as it relates to these conflicts, can very much co-exist quite well. The above quote comes from Dr. Thomas Plante’s…
Daniel Pink Explains How to Kill Creativity
Solving model problems or creating something the world didn’t know it was missing relies heavily on Harlow’s third drive, a model he calls the Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity–which holds in part: intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity. This quote comes from Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising…