Dingo doodlings
So the Pope nods off while praying? No, the Pope prays while nodding off.
Title for a sermon on Galatians 3:27: “The Man Who Took His Christ for a Hat”.
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” Poor Monsieur Pascal: he had a tin ear for star song and galactic symphonies.
Before I ask a minister whom I don’t know what theologians he reads, I ask him what novels he has read. If he reads novels, I go on to poetry. If he doesn’t read novels, I lose interest in the conversation. Then, for my nightly devotions, I pray for those who listen to his sermons and experience his pastoral care.
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Stevens, the English butler, speaks of “that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is the essence of good waiting.” Ergo good praying too.
A famous paradigm of the pastor is the “wounded healer”. Shouldn’t that be “healing wounder”? Only truth and love can heal, but both begin with the recoil of hurt and pain.
My dear pastor, ask not how many people you have fixed, rather pray that the number you have broken is few.
The progressive will eventually become an embarrassment, but the reactionary will always be an asshole.
Great bumper sticker: “America First? Matthew 20:16!”
“Patriotic” Americans will make any sacrifice except sacrifice itself.
I feel for those for whom “thoughts and prayers” has become either a mindless mantra or a euphemism for “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”. But don’t despair. Turn to the Psalms. There you will find the integrity of lament, outrage, and imprecation, the perfect obsecrations for the NRA and its lackey politicians.
Good news for American misogynists: it’s now legal to carry a concealed weapon across state lines – in addition, that is, to the one they’re born with.
The problem with all moral arguments for torture is that they are utilitarian. If they were deontological I would have more respect for them. As O’Brien frankly states in 1984, “The object of torture is torture.”
Ah, if only the roads of social and cultural nostalgia led to Eden. They don’t. They converge on a new Nuremburg.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. What was cool yesterday is uncool today, and what is uncool today will be cool tomorrow. Likes, Followers, Trending – puffs of smoke! But suggest that I close my Twitter and Facebook accounts – go chase the wind!
Both the fulsome panegyrics for and fulminating diatribes against the Reformation commit the same just-so story fallacy, treating it as the inception rather than the invention of modernity.
When a snake sheds its skin it does not become a post-snake. So too modernity does not become post-modernity when it modernises, it is simply shedding its skin. Modernity is modernising. In its deep grammar, “modernity” is a gerundive.
On November 8th, 2016, they thought they were walking into a voting booth when actually they were marching to the guillotine. The election of Trump has been the decapitation of White American Evangelicalism, with all the squawking, frenzy, and gore you’d expect from a headless fowl.
With a lifetime of trying, I have never found the truth. Occasionally, however, it has bumped into me – and once He ran me over.
God bumps into us when we’re least expecting it, so why on earth should people go to church anticipating an encounter with God? I always go to church with no expectations whatsoever, and I am usually not disappointed. But then ubi et quando Deo visum est – thunder from a clear blue sky.
Psychology (it seems to me) is a sort of meteorology of the self. Epiphanies or traumas – they’re climate change.
If you think it’s hard to be yourself, try not being yourself.
The older I get, the more I am interested in antiquities. Why is that?
I can just about cope with the aches and indignities of aging. It’s the well-meaning concern of others for them that I can’t handle.
Great bumper sticker: “America First? Matthew 20:16!”
“Patriotic” Americans will make any sacrifice except sacrifice itself.
I feel for those for whom “thoughts and prayers” has become either a mindless mantra or a euphemism for “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”. But don’t despair. Turn to the Psalms. There you will find the integrity of lament, outrage, and imprecation, the perfect obsecrations for the NRA and its lackey politicians.
Good news for American misogynists: it’s now legal to carry a concealed weapon across state lines – in addition, that is, to the one they’re born with.
The problem with all moral arguments for torture is that they are utilitarian. If they were deontological I would have more respect for them. As O’Brien frankly states in 1984, “The object of torture is torture.”
Ah, if only the roads of social and cultural nostalgia led to Eden. They don’t. They converge on a new Nuremburg.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. What was cool yesterday is uncool today, and what is uncool today will be cool tomorrow. Likes, Followers, Trending – puffs of smoke! But suggest that I close my Twitter and Facebook accounts – go chase the wind!
Both the fulsome panegyrics for and fulminating diatribes against the Reformation commit the same just-so story fallacy, treating it as the inception rather than the invention of modernity.
When a snake sheds its skin it does not become a post-snake. So too modernity does not become post-modernity when it modernises, it is simply shedding its skin. Modernity is modernising. In its deep grammar, “modernity” is a gerundive.
On November 8th, 2016, they thought they were walking into a voting booth when actually they were marching to the guillotine. The election of Trump has been the decapitation of White American Evangelicalism, with all the squawking, frenzy, and gore you’d expect from a headless fowl.
With a lifetime of trying, I have never found the truth. Occasionally, however, it has bumped into me – and once He ran me over.
God bumps into us when we’re least expecting it, so why on earth should people go to church anticipating an encounter with God? I always go to church with no expectations whatsoever, and I am usually not disappointed. But then ubi et quando Deo visum est – thunder from a clear blue sky.
Psychology (it seems to me) is a sort of meteorology of the self. Epiphanies or traumas – they’re climate change.
If you think it’s hard to be yourself, try not being yourself.
The older I get, the more I am interested in antiquities. Why is that?
I can just about cope with the aches and indignities of aging. It’s the well-meaning concern of others for them that I can’t handle.
