What made Christianity so dangerous [to imperial Rome] was its uncompromising, radical de-divinization of the world. —Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics Early Christian thinking, like the biblical thinking of the Jewish culture which informed it, was a sedition against the entire pagan world of the sacred. It abolished nature gods: the moon goddess, […]
What has happened to Ash Wednesday? Is the wearing of ashes in decline everywhere? Or only in New York City, a sanctuary city for people of every faith or unfaith? Or was I just in the wrong part of town at the wrong hour? I took an early commuter train into the city this […]
A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental; they necessarily are reflected in his theology. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Of all the modern substitutes for religion, it is the aesthetic sense which is the most esteemed. Edward Norman, Entering the Darkness […]
Your friends are not religious; they are only pew-renters. They are not moral; they are only conventional. Don Juan to the Devil in Shaw’s Man and Superman A sense of the holy brings with it a sense of taboo. We tread cautiously in the tenting place of the ineffable. A Presence abides. We dare not […]
Beauty is my business as thoroughly as trouble is Raymond Chandler’s. Still, you will never catch me talking about “the beautiful.” I have no idea what it is or what it might look like. A transcendental is a bit like a virtual “friend”—you never get to see it. In the lived life, beauty is sensible. […]
We do live in history, and this age is hard to bear. Jacques Ellul, Hope in Time of Abandonment To be of one’s time means to attend to the nature of the times. It means resisting the siren call of the day’s enthusiasms—zeal for environmentalism, sustainability, multiculturalism, global fixes, et alia—in order to stay mindful […]
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