Ignatius’ letter to the Magnesians, 4.1:
πρέπον οὖν ἐστὶν μὴ μόνον καλεῖσθαι Χριστιανούς, ἀλλὰ καὶ εἶναι.
Therefore it is proper to not be only called Christians, but to be Christians.
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Form Carsten Jensen’s We, The Drowned, describing food given to prisoners of war held in a church:
We were each given a spoon and a metal bowl and made to line up by the altar. And it was, in its way, a form of communion, because it took every last scrap of imagination to transubstantiate what was in our metal bowls into something edible . . .
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People of my generation are more cautious. I think we don’t believe that people can be improved in their character by reason. That seems a very french idea.
~ The hacendado in All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
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I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Even more than critical thinking or time management, what the white-collar economy requires from most workers is the ability to spend the bulk of their waking hours completing tasks of no inherent importance or interest to them, to show up every day, and to not complain overmuch about it.
Christopher R. Beha, in an article on for-profit colleges. From “Leveling the Field” in Harper’s vol. 323, no. 1937, p. 56.
Ordinary speech is full of such errors. Semantics is constantly correcting our carelessness.
William H. Gass, on some writing errors in a short excerpt. In “Enter A Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s”, Haprer’s vol. 323, no. 1937, p. 78.
You used to sound like a teacher / and everyone wanted to know / how you could tell the truth / without losing that soft glow.
~ David Bazan and Jason Martin in the Ghosts of the Past version of “Broken Arm”
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Cornel West turned me on to John Keats’ “negative capability”:
‘The concept of Negative Capability is the ability to contemplate the world without the desire to try and reconcile contradictory aspects or fit it into closed and rational systems.’
…
‘At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’
I need that.
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In writing about Christian attitudes toward justice, Jacques Ellul argues that natural law is incompatible with justification by faith:
Such a theory [of Natural Law] leads to an elimination of the Doctrine of Justification, for this doctrine when properly understood puts an end to every pretension of Man to know Justice naturally by his own means — to say nothing of achieving it. If God alone is just and does not impart his righteousness to Man except in justification — if He does not make known to Man His work of justice except by revealing Himself to Man — then we must conclude that Man knows nothing of justice apart from this act of God; that there is no justice written in the nature of Man.
In other words, how can there be justice (righteousness) in nature when we are wholly dependent on God for righteousness? It is an interesting point. I know that many Christians partake of both sides of the dichotomy which Ellul is presenting here.
James McGrath does not express Christian moral obligations in the same terms I do, but he agrees that various conceptions of Christian “objective” morality are problematic. My favorite quote:
And so perhaps, instead of trying to prove that morality is objective, we should be working to make it objective, if morality is something we are concerned about.
Whether subjective or objective, get that plank out of your own eye first.
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