Coming to Terms

Pressed metaphors and other signposts
at the intersection of positive and negative theology

Ran across recently a bunch of groups on Facebook for “Proverbs 31 women.” I’m sure each of them is very nice. Also pink. However, this is what it means for my wife to be a Proverbs 31 woman (verses 8-9 also apply.) This is also now gracing our kitchen wall.

Ran across recently a bunch of groups on Facebook for “Proverbs 31 women.” I’m sure each of them is very nice. Also pink. However, this is what it means for my wife to be a Proverbs 31 woman (verses 8-9 also apply.)

This is also now gracing our kitchen wall.

The idea for this juxtaposition of word and image was from a woman at my parish named Martha, a protest against the evangelical art form of pretty-picture-with-validating-scripture, as if the beauty of a picture were not sufficient on its own. This is now hanging on our kitchen wall.

The idea for this juxtaposition of word and image was from a woman at my parish named Martha, a protest against the evangelical art form of pretty-picture-with-validating-scripture, as if the beauty of a picture were not sufficient on its own.

This is now hanging on our kitchen wall.


“ Many introverts feel there’s something wrong with them, and try to pass as extroverts. But whenever you try to pass as something you’re not, you lose a part of yourself along the way. You especially lose a sense of how to spend your time. Introverts are constantly going to parties and such when they’d really prefer to be home reading, studying, inventing, meditating, designing, thinking, cooking…or any number of other quiet and worthwhile activities.
The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance: Scientific American

“ The conservative is in general some sort of an Aristotelian in his theory of how one acquires knowledge. True, we act in contexts, but we also judge the context and obviously reorder it on occasion. Truth is ultimately to be authenticated not otherwise than through inference, or through nonsensory perception.
Francis G. Wilson, in The University Bookman: Oakeshott and Conservatism (1963)


reblogged from
dailyflanneryoc
“ At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
Flannery O’Connor (via dailyflanneryoc)
“ Now you have to learn to read this rightly, or it will just drive you nuts …
Dallas Willard on the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:1–18

“ Most religious celebrations gather us around a table of some sort. They hand us a book, or a plate, or speak a word demanding a response. They want to ‘touch’ us. Choral Evensong is a liturgical expression of Christ’s Nolle me tangere – ‘Do not touch me. I have not yet ascended to my Father’ (St. John 20: 17). It reminds us that thresholds can be powerful places of contemplation; and that leaving someone alone with their thoughts is not always denying them hospitality or welcome.
‘Do not touch me’: the wisdom of Anglican thresholds – Telegraph Blogs

reblogged from
ayjay
“ The real question, John [of the Cross] suggests, is about what you are really after: Do you want ‘spirituality’, mystical experience, inner peace, or do you want God? If you want God, then you must be prepared to let go all, absolutely all, substitute satisfactions, intellectual and emotional. You must recognize that God is so unlike whatever can be thought or pictured that, when you have got beyond the stage of self-indulgent religiosity, there will be nothing you can securely know or feel. You face a blank: and any attempt to avoid that or shy away from it is a return to playing comfortable religious games. The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your own religious world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of purchase on God, you are still playing games. On the other hand, if you can face and accept and even rejoice in the experience of darkness, if you accept God is more than an idea which keeps your religion or philosophy or politics tidy – then you may find a way back to religion, philosophy or politics, to an engagement with them that is more creative because you are more aware of the oddity, the uncontrollable quality of the truth at the heart of all things. This is what ‘detachment’ means – not being ‘above the battle’, but being involved in such a way that you can honestly confront whatever comes to you without fear of the unknown; it is a kind of readiness for the unexpected, if that is not too much of a paradox.
Rowan Williams, “The Dark Night” (via ayjay)

“ Art is the well making of what needs making.
Eric Gill


reblogged from
dailyflanneryoc
“ The mind serves best when it’s anchored in the word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity …
Flannery O’Connor (via dailyflanneryoc)