“The Christians I have to deal with don’t need to be reborn so much as they just need to grow up.”
—M. Scott (via nachtseite)
July 2010
40 posts
“
In monastic terms, the liturgy is the path towards an exalted “ecstasy”, a flight into the cloud of unknowing, the place where God is, and where the true contemplation of the creative stillness of God is possible. And this is a reality which is beyond the ability of historians, theologians, linguists, biblical scholars or even pastoral liturgists to express. Their contributions may even hinder rather than help. The intensity and intangibility of this experience can only be expressed through the arts.
This is why music of quality is a critical element within the life of the Church. It is a necessity, not a luxury. It is neither a frivolous confection nor an elitist distraction from the real business of faith. Music of quality, in the context of worship, does not entertain or divert. It reveals. By means of evolving harmonies, rhythms, textures, modulations, orchestrations, melodies, counterpoints, imitations, this rich art form has the potential to create an aural environment which enables us to contemplate the mystery of God.
Music of this calibre draws us into an engagement so profound that its sense can never be exhausted. Any work of art, be it sculpture, painting, literature, poetry or music, whose implications are immediately obvious and can instantly be grasped can never enlist our imagination, and so cannot equip us for mystery; and what cannot equip us for mystery cannot equip us for God.
” —John Shepherd, Trite music blocks our ears to the divine in the liturgy -Times Online
“And it is the scholar’s great strength that he is, in the last resort, more supple and adaptable than the doctrinaire. He will not break his head against a stone wall. ‘The situation is thus and thus’, he will say, ‘and it is useless to deny it; we cannot tamper with the facts.’”
—Why we need scholarship and intellectual integrity–Dorothy L. Sayers « Grateful to the dead
“How did Catholicism get great priests and teachers like Father Schall? That’s perhaps the most urgent question facing Catholic higher education today, as the generation of giants that emerged from the Catholic intellectual renaissance of the mid-20th century passes from the scene. My hunch is that the giants we have known—and, in the case of Father Schall, hope to know for years to come—combined a distinctively Catholic rootedness in the intellectual tradition of the West with a sense of adventure in engaging a modernity of which they were neither overawed nor afraid. A solid son of the American Midwest (Pocahontas, Iowa, in his case), James Schall could think clearly in the turbulence of the late 20th and early 21st century because he was solidly grounded in the enduring truths, and because he was a man of faith who knew that God’s purposes would, finally, win out in history. May God grant him a swift recovery and many more years of showing us the way.”
—George Weigel, In Praise of Father Schall | First Things
“
If possible we must work our way through this scientific climate to God. We now see a little more clearly the relationship between science and religion. Science has reference to that which can be weighed and measured, and religion to that which can be evaluated; the one has reference to the quantitative aspects of life, and the other to the qualitative.
Science comes to a mother’s tear and defines it in terms of its physical structure—so much water, so much mucus, so much salt. But is that an adequate definition of a mother’s tear? Hardly, says religion, for there are ideas, emotions, values, meanings using the physical structure of the tear. Religion would evaluate those imponderables. Thus it would take the answer of both science and religion to give an adequate definition of a mother’s tear.
True. But the snag is this: You can verify that which can be weighed and measured; can you verify values? Why not? You can put values under life to see what life will do with them. You can test them by the test of experiment. If the values are real values, life will approve them, will back them; but if they are not real, they will wither—they will not be able to stand up to life; the universe will not approve them. When you live by them, you will fight a losing battle; they will let you down.
” —E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living, p. 9.
“Almighty God, beautiful in majesty, majestic in holiness, who have shown us the splendor of creation in the work of your servants Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, and Heinrich Schütz: Teach us to drive from the world the ugliness of chaos and disorder, that our eyes may not be blind to your glory, and that at length everyone may know the inexhaustible richness of your new creation in Jesus Christ our Lord.”
—Kiefer’s Biography: J S Bach, musician (28 July 1750) with Handel and Schuetz
Half-baked R&D →
designswarm.com
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino on The Half-baked R&D Model:
Companies who don’t officially have a space for innovation but have one or 2 people who are creative and want to do r&d. So they make them do r&d mostly but brush it aside the second client work comes in. Really dangerous as a model as the level of frustration of those people escalates rather rapidly. You’re either dedicated to the idea that people can do good new and useful things in specific conditions where they are isolated from the everyday, or not. Don’t pretend.
See also: The Osmosis Model, The Alpha-person Model, The Start-up & Flip Model
[via]
“
So, in John’s vision, the martyrs in the heavenly throneroom are models for us. They diagnose our true condition by showing that the world serves false gods, and they offer us a model to be emulated: like them, we must worship only the one true God, and put our lives on the line for our testimony to him.
Wayne Meeks writes about the Book of Revelation, “The business of this writing is to stand things on their heads in the perceptions of its audience, to rob the established order of the most fundamental power of all: its sheer facticity. The moral strategy of the Apocalypse, therefore, is to destroy common sense as a guide for life.”
” —Richard B. Hayes, Carrying the Death of Jesus
“
Reading the profile after Mass today, it seemed to me that she gave up what is most entrancing about the Christian Faith, that promise from Love Himself of an ever-deepening knowledge of reality, which is to say Himself, with His promise to transform me to conform to it and to Him as part of His creation of a new heavens and a new earth. The fun is that things get realer. God clears the fog.
But this urbane English religion — this kind of high agnosticism — seems to move in the opposition direction. The fog thickens rather than clears.
” —David Mills on P. D. James, in A High and Appealing Agnosticism » First Thoughts
“What Robinson’s book shows perhaps most clearly is that reductionism is not a philosophy honestly distilled from experience, but a dogma imposed upon it. For roughly a century and a half, Western culture has been falling ever more thoroughly under the sway of the prejudice that modern empirical science is not only the sole model of genuine truth but also capable of explaining all things. It is a strange belief, but to those who hold it sincerely, nothing is more intolerable than the thought that anything might lie beyond the probative reach of their “mechanical philosophy.” And so the exclusion of interiority, and of the self’s consciousness of itself, from their understanding of our humanity is simply inevitable, no matter how irrational or arbitrary that exclusion may be.”
—
D. B. Hart, In Self-Defense | Big Questions Online
on Absence of Mind
“There is no secret. Or rather, the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family.”
—Walker Percy, interviewed on the secret to the success of his marriage, in Signposts in a Strange Land
“
Insight questions can only be asked after you develop situation awareness. They are necessarily local and unique to the situation. When you are faced with a difficult situation, you will start as a prisoner of the unanswerable/too expensive formulaic questions, and your first job is to break out. The reason the weird “right questions” work is that they expose cracks in your default, formulaic mental model. By attacking those cracks, you force the useless default mental model to collapse, creating room for a new one.
As Einstein said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”
” —The Dangerous Art of the Right Question (via Bobulate)
I would add to one of the comments here from Venkat that banality is in the eye of the beholder. An answer may seem banal from within your current mental framework but the seeming platitude may reveal an open secret.
The Einstein quote is also addressed by Polanyi.
“If they would be saved, the Boomer Generation must be guided into repentance for the way they self-righteously sacrificed all others as they fled from the simple heroism of adult human life. The rigid eradication of tradition, the gross materialism, the unbridled license, the embarrassing promiscuity—all always accompanied by shrill distortion and denial—have left our society disconnected, bloated, poorly educated, unable to trust, and simmering in resentment. I see many of my Millennial Generation students clamoring to set back the clock to a day before the Sixties, when there were grown-ups.”
—
Barbara Nicolosi, Save the Boomers, Save the World: Redeeming Culture
My mother, a boomer, is fully on board with this analysis
“No amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.”
—Wendell Berry (via soma.life)
“
In the first chapters of Orthodoxy, we find Chesterton seeking to explain the limits of human confidence: there is a misguided confidence proper to the “Maniac,” of one who thinks the human will can demolish and transcend all limitations, but there is also a wise confidence proper to the human reason—one that, in modern times has committed “suicide”—which affirms that human beings by their nature tend to know what is real, true, and good. That we are so often mistaken should remind us that we can sometimes be correct, rather than sending us down into the darkness of doubt, relativism, and skepticism. Modern man, for fear of being wrong about something, refuses to think about anything, he protests; Chesterton would have us think boldly, trusting that our fellow men, God, and our own sense of reason will correct us when need be. Being wrong, after all, is a part of a complete life—it is its own kind of peculiar gift. Richard Wilbur captures this Chestertonian affirmation amid error in his little poem, “On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower”:
” —James Matthew Wilson, An Homage to Chesterton (via michaelfunderburk)A thrush, because I’d been wrong,
Burst rightly into song
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only.
“She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
—The Misfit, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
“[A]n essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English–just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this exam should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”
—C. S. Lewis, 1958 letter to the editor of The Christian Century, in Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 3:1006-7, cited in Between Two Worlds: The Promises and Perils of Bilingual Christians
“Your enjoyment of the World is never right, till you so esteem it, that everything in it, is more your treasure than a King’s exchequer full of Gold and Silver. And that exchequer yours also in its place and service. Can you take too much joy in your Father’s works? He is Himself in everything. Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as pleasing as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason.”
—Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations 1.25
“Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, that is, the use of bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cure the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”
—
at the Claremont institute, via @ayjay
Since we’re on a drinking theme.
“And I confess, as an outsider to drinking and beer, I used to think it was all about the buzz, that drinking anything with alcohol was about escaping the present and drifting into a sloshy other world. But now I know something I did not before. Beer is not simply a means of drunkenness nor is it merely a lubricant to grease the skids to sin. Beer, well respected and rightly consumed, can be a gift of God. It is one of his mysteries which it was his delight to conceal and the glory of kings to search out. And men enjoy it to mark their days and celebrate their moments and stand with their brothers in the face of what life brings.”
—
Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness, xxv, via Adiaphora: His Delight to Conceal
“Nothing that can be said or left unsaid can make or mar the Poem itself. The most elaborate scholarship, the most penetrating and illuminative criticism are as dust in the balance, compared with the humblest and poorest reprint of the actual text. None the less it is by taking thought that we inherit the kingdom of genius. The greater the poem, the greater it becomes the more closely and attentively it is studied. He who runs may read, but he who stays to read over and over again will not only “recapture the first fine careless rapture”, but as his knowledge grows so will his reverence and his love. Poetry may be studied in the wrong way, but it cannot be studied too much. Its beauty is renewed from age to age. There is no end to its significance.”
—
E. H. Coleridge, preface to an edition of Christabel
I don’t know that I agree with all of this, but it captures something of literature and perhaps scripture too
“‘We can do our science, or our painting, or our doctoring quite well without Christ’—that sounds a very reasonable thing to say, if we forget or were never told that Christ is precisely the truth we are discovering, the beauty we are expressing, the life we are restoring, and the energy and skill we put to all these things.”
—
Dorothy L. Sayers
Letter to the bishop of Coventry, June 26, 1944, Letters vol 3, p 26
“Celebrate your lack of plan.”
—Liz Danzico / Humble Pied.
“A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it (though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive). Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, image, which tease us not out of reality but deeper and more completely into it.”
—Christian Wiman (most recently from here: The truths of Art and Religion - Rod Dreher, via MM)
“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
—
Wife is reading this again. It may be impossible to read this line out loud with a straight face.
“In analyzing the changes brought about by new concepts of authority, Sayers traces the loss of its theological character at the time of the Renaissance and the Reformation, shows its later identification with the ‘national’ principle, and the subsequent changes brought about by the growth of democracy and by demands for greater liberty in every sphere. Europe, she argues, was dominated in succession by an incomplete view of human nature and society. In the eighteenth century, the rational element was overemphasized. The advance of natural science stressed ‘biological man,’ followed by ‘sociological man,’ and then ‘psychological man.’ Pleading for a return to the concept of the ‘whole man,’ not as an ideal but as a reality, she reminds her readers, both English and American, of their shortcomings, too often regarded as twentieth-century virtues, which desperately need to be excluded from the new order: the passion for absolutes, the yearning for an impossible static security, the dread of original thought, the repudiation of Christian morality, and the naïve faith in technology—both industrial and bureaucratic.”
—Dorothy L. Sayers as Christian integralist. Quote from Lee W. Gibbs, The Middle Way: Voices of Anglicanism (1991), p 108 as found by Chris Armstrong in Reclaiming the “integrated medieval worldview” for today « Grateful to the dead
“
My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy—they’re given, after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
” —Jeff Bezos’s Princeton Commencement (via soxiam)
There’s a great line in Harvey to this effect as well.
“First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgment, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading.”
—
C. S. Lewis, Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism
This strikes me as an inherent problem in many contemporary scientific approaches. Steve Talbott talks about this in terms of biologists focusing on mechanisms rather than the organism that is doing the living.
“Where gestures lack style, ethics itself becomes debased.”
—Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 240 (here, via MM)
“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”
—David McCullough (via Brenda Clough)
“… he consecrated long years of necessary research in order to surmount the main deficiency of all intellectualist philosophy—which is to say an ignorance of life as everyone experiences it.”
—an interesting tidbit from the Wikipedia article on Michel Henry (via lukescommonplacebook)
“The blessing of the liturgy is that it wipes out self.”
—Rumer Godden (via the Anchoress)
