Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity that pre-Christian Western culture would have found not so much foolish as unintelligible. It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things-they would never have occurred to us-had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.
C.S. Lewis Is On Fire
Sir Jack the Blessed Heretic of Narnia
It seems that someone dropped a little piece of rainbow on the floor by the window (Taken with instagram)
Bet you can name all but one… (Taken with instagram)
Hemingway studied Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev…Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ‘Nobody’s’ … he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.
I say the gods deal very unrightly with us. For they will neither (which would be the best of all) go away and leave us to live our own short days to ourselves, nor will they show themselves openly and tell us what they would have us do. For that too would be endurable. But to hint and hover, to draw near us in dreams and oracles, or in a waking vision that vanishes as soon as seen, to be dead silent when we question them and then glide back and whisper (words we cannot understand) in our ears when we most wish to be free of them, and to show to one what they must hide from another; what is all this but cat-and-mouse play, blindman’s buff, and mere jugglery? Why must holy places be dark places?
Gandhi on Jesus
In other words, as St Augustine makes plain (De Civ. Dei xii, cap. I), pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall—a fall of the creature’s attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself
Theology, while saying that a special illumination has been vouchsafed to Christians and (earlier) to Jews, also says that there is some divine illumination vouchsafed to all men. The Divine light, we are told, “lighteneth every man.” We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story—the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth.
So then we must be wary of spending all our time poring over the words, talking about them, and memorizing them, for it could well be that such activities could mask the very Word that they bear witness to. Our task is not simply to return to the Bible, but to return to the life-giving Word that gave birth to the Bible and that speaks through it—hearing the message by living it out rather than merely rejoicing in its eloquence.From The Orthodox Heretic by Peter Rollins
When people say things like this I tend to think they are right, but I’m still terribly bugged by it because I really like words….
All I have ever said is that the New Testament plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in ‘the outer darkness.’ Whether this means…being left to a purely mental state…or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you could call a world or a reality, I would never pretend to know.
C.S. Lewis on Hell, in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves
I think this quote encapsulates what I consider to be a much more coherent attitude than currently exists toward ideas like heaven or hell, or even angels or demons, etc. Questions like, “Do you believe in a literal Hell?” or “Do you actually believe in demons?” make little sense, precisely because we are talking about realms that our outside of the reality of our basic senses. Because what does “literal” or “actual” or even “reality” mean outside of the one we are currently swimming in? How would we ever know? When you start talking about anything metaphysical, the line between “reality” and “metaphor” gets fuzzy.
And it would be a good thing if we could be comfortable with that.
Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist. It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book. Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves unnecessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious. That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan. In the same way, literature written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography, and the like, and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work in hand.
I am gambling that there is a significant audience interested in a kind of rational spirituality that can nudge the world in a more tolerant and uplifting direction. I am gambling that, somewhere between the hardcore reductionists who explain all things as the sum of their parts and greet every suggestion of spirituality with a sneer, and the unquestioning faithful who receive their beliefs full-blown from prophets and preachers, there is a group of philosophical centrists-well-intentioned, open-minded, skeptical, but free spirits eager to investigate their own nature.
More Quantum Physics for Dummies…
Too bad that when I was trying to explain observer-dependent reality to my kids, I forgot this little ditty from Fred Kuttner’s book, Quantum Enigma.
There was a young fellow named Todd
Who said, “It’s exceedingly odd
To think that this tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
The reply:
There is nothing especially odd;
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why this tree
Can continue to be
When observed by Yours faithfully, God.
Kuttner is a physicist at UCSC. Though he doesn’t buy the old philosopher Bishop Berkeley’s idea that God is the Great Observer, collapsing all the wave forms and bringing this universe into continual existence, he does admit that the weirdness of quantum physics opens doors that more adamantly naturalistic scientists had hoped were firmly shut. This also from his book:
It is sometimes implied that the sages of ancient religions intuited aspects of contemporary quantum mechanics. The argument can go on to claim that quantum mechanics provides evidence for the validity of such teachings. The reasoning is not compelling. However, the Newtonian worldview can be seen as completely dismissing such ideas. Quantum mechanics, telling of a universal connectedness and involving observation in the nature of reality, denies such dismissal. In this most general sense, one can see physics supporting some thinking of ancient sages. (When Bohr was knighted, he put the Yin-Yang symbol in his coat of arms.)
If you are a layman in science with an interest in things like this, Kuttner’s book is a pretty thoughtful and fair discussion.
