February 2012
8 posts
3 tags
Rant: Book Design
Caveat: I know next to nothing about the book publishing industry, especially from the inside.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that some publishers pay very little attention to the readability and design of their books and make enjoying them quite difficult on the reader. Gaudy and attention-less cover art, problem-creating page margins, mind-numbing fully justified paragraphs, font and leading...
4 tags
There’s Only One True Port
“Some of the monks tried to drag them away but it was plain they’d never leave till Brendan spoke of his voyages to them. It was the shortest I ever heard him do it.
‘I’ll tell you about my voyages then,’ he said. ‘They never did anybody a bit of good least of all Christ.’ The wet was pelting his face.
‘There’s only one true port,’ he said. ‘That’s Heaven. God grant we never shipwreck on our...
3 tags
“If it was dark, it was the darkness of the womb.”
– » Lynn White (via mediumaevum)
No Better Than Judas After All
Pete Peterson on one of the most affecting books I’ve ever read, Shusako Endo’s Silence:
“The fawn wouldn’t die, at least not according to my schedule. I gave up on it. What was I to do? Wait beside the road all night? Throw it in my truck and wait until morning to drive it to a vet? I didn’t have time for that. I left. I stood up and left it writhing in the grass coughing and sputtering and...
2 tags
Sharper Eyes in His Head Than Ours
“Joseph, Mary, pray for Dismas. Thou knowest he was feckless and fat. He was foolish as well and a thief. Lazy he was, making gruff Gestas a handmaid to pick things up if he dropped them and help him over ice if there was ice. But Gestas found something dear in him, it seems. Maybe Gestas had sharper eyes in his head than ours.
Maybe the best Dismas ever did with all his years of monkery was win...
January 2012
14 posts
2 tags
Christ Was the Wizard of All Wizards
“MacLennin wouldn’t let him off the couch without first hearing the manner of king this Christ was that made Brendan’s heart so good, and I doubt Brendan ever preached the Gospel in just such a pickle again.
The fuzzy naked bard with his gilly flowers over one eye took Brendan on one of his knees, his arms clasped about him, and t was there Brendan did it, perched like a bot fly on a bull’s hump....
3 tags
A Well-Intentioned Business
“Do you understand what monotheism in the Christian faith means? God knows, not the number ‘one,’ but with this subject in His sheer uniqueness and otherness over against all others, different from all the ridiculous deities whom man invents. Once we have realized this, we can only laugh, and there is a laugh running through the Bible at these figures. Once the true God has been...
“With regard to the sharpest and most melting sorrow, that which arises from the...”
– » Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler, 15 May 1750. (via wesleyhill)
5 tags
Not Responsible for My Own Being
“To live the life of active fellowship with God is, therefore, to live out of the event of freedom from sin and death. Evangelical freedom is the freedom that comes from not being finally responsible for my own being: by the mercy of God I am restored to know myself to be a creature in fellowship with my creator and savior. And to such freedom I cannot liberate myself: self-liberation is precisely...
3 tags
The Annual Best Of Post
Best Books of 2011
As usual: this is a list of the best books that I’ve read this year, not books published this year (also applies to the below Best of Music).
Heavenly Participation: Reweaving the Sacramental Tapestry by Hans Boersma. Enjoyed this book because of the oddity of trying to combine Protestant theology with non-Thomist medieval Catholicism in order to recover a fuller, truer view...
5 tags
Secretly Surrounded in All Lowliness
“The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others; it is the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God. For in Jesus Christ God has created all things, He has created all of us. We exist not apart from Him, but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apaprt from him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word....
5 tags
“Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to...”
– » Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 21
“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t...”
– from the best thing Andrew Sullivan has written (via wesleyhill)
December 2011
16 posts
“Let us, then, meditate upon the Nativity just as we see it happening in our own...”
– Martin Luther (via wesleyhill)
5 tags
We Are Incapable of Telling
“God is in himself replete, unoriginal love, the reciprocal fellowship and delight of the three and the utter repose and satisfaction of their love. God requires nothing other than himself. Yet his unoriginal love also originates. Why this should be so, we are incapable of telling, for though with much concentration we can begin to grasp that it is fitting that God should so act, created...
Exiled Preacher: Blogging in the name of the Lord:... →
Googling oneself is rarely a helpful exercise, but since I know hardly anyone reads this blog, I thought I’d make a count using the link: limiter.
To my shock, I found a 2009 interview by Guy Davies in the UK with Westminster professor of church history R. Scott Clark, linked to in the post. In the interview about blogging, Dr. Clark kindly said that this blog was one of the five that is...
“Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The...”
– Peter Hitchens on his brother Christopher (via ayjay)
5 tags
‘Credo In’ Means that I Am Not Alone
“It is noteworthy that, apart from this first expression ‘I believe,’ the Confession is silent upon the subjective fact of faith. Nor was it a a good time when this relationship was reversed, when Christians grew eloquent over their action, over the uplift and emotion of the experience of this thing, which took place in man, and when they became speechless as to what we may believe. By the silence...
The Church Cannot Be an Elite in the World
“Pelagianism was an onslaught on the languid, second-rate Christianity which blurred the line between a conventional Christian and the ordinary, pagan Roman. ‘God wished his people to be holy and free from all injustice an iniquity. He wished it to be so, so devout, so pure, so immaculate, so innocent, that the heathen might find nothing to revile in it’; a Christian whose conduct is...
6 tags
A Silent But Beneficent Machine
Sorry about the length, but this passage from Charles Taylor is incredibly insightful and goes a long way to helping us understand why most of us can no longer easily “delight in the works of His hands.”:
“Here another supremely important aspect of this whole dimension of human thinking comes to the fore. The framework, the meaning of being, is relative not just to a vision of the world, but also...
“Comedy … is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much...”
– W. H. Auden (via ayjay)
November 2011
4 posts
5 tags
From Church to State
“The shift from medieval to modern—from church power to state power—was a long, complex process with gains and losses. Whatever it was, it was not a simple progressive march from violence to peace. The gradual transfer of loyalty from international church to national state was not the end of violence in Europe, but a migration of the holy from church to state in the establishment of the ideal of...
6 tags
War Nullified the Progress of a Century
After the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, “The population had fallen from 21 million to 13 million. Between a third and a half of the people were dead. Whole cities, like Magdeburg, stood in ruins. Whole districts lay stripped of their inhabitants, their livestock, their supplies. Trade had virtually ceased. A whole generation of pillage, famine, disease, and social disruption had wreaked such havoc...
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge...”
– Czeslaw Milosz (via invicemsunt)
October 2011
8 posts
3 tags
“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in...”
– Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (via triadic)
It’s a Contested, Raucous Process
“Suppose God wants to correct a corruption in His church. Is He able to speak to it? Can God’s voice break through to rebuke and correct and train in righteousness? Can our traditions muzzle the Lord of the church? Can He by His Spirit speak independently of, and against, the tradition?
Why not? It’s happened. It’s a contested, raucous process. It always is. But it happens. Golly, it happened in...
6 tags
More Modest and More Urgent
“Compare a modern scholarly biblical commentary with one by Calvin. The difference is not simply the availability to the modern writer of considerably more by way of historical materials, but a changed relation to the text itself and to the act of explication. A modern scholarly commentator has the task of accounting for the text, and a set of tools at her disposal to establish how the text came...
“Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things...”
– How to write fiction: Geoff Dyer on freedom | Books | guardian.co.uk
Ayjay: “I think this is profoundly important for young artists and intellectuals to know. Similarly, a story I often tell: when he was a young trumpet player in New York, Miles Davis was so intimidated by Dizzy Gillespie that he...
5 tags
Be Careful How You Apologize
“All these factors [new science, partisanship during the Wars of Religion, views of religious zeal, etc.] played a role; but I do not think that they can fully illuminate the fourfold anthropocentric shift [in the doctrine of God and providence] I’ve been describing.It is certain that religious fervor fell off among the leading strata of many European countries. A certain skepticism, even a...
“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments,...”
– Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (1985)
The Blogging Parson: How to Write a Theology Essay →
Looking forward to this series of posts by Moore College’s Michael Jensen. (a planned 17 posts)