Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

Reality is objective; our consciousness of it is, to some degree, our choice. --Steven of Flos Carmeli

The semi-comforting, if admirably modest, motto of the Fall River, Massachusetts police department: "We'll Try." - - Dylan of "dark speech upon the harp"

One would think that historical criticism is primarily concerned with, well, history. It isn’t...Writes Legaspi, “What was once an intellectual project for making sense of the Bible appears to have become a sociopolitical proposal for regulating dialogue.” Biblical scholars are important primarily as gatekeepers. They are academic officials who designate what does and does not count as “responsible” interpretation of the Bible…As Collins writes in an approving summary of the history of his discipline, “Where medieval culture had celebrated belief as a virtue and regarded doubt as a sin, the modern critical mentality regards doubt as a necessary first step in testing knowledge and the will to believe as a threat to rational thought.” The postmoderns [are] welcomed into academic debates for one simple reason: They help undermine belief and sow religious doubt. - R. Reno of "First Things"

Everyone is carrying the pain around, along with the hope and grace that does, indeed, glimmer, even faintly. It is maybe not so sensitive and might actually be an act of self-absorption to simply dump all of our own pain on anyone who happens to walk by - we can't do that, for in indiscriminately pouring out our souls we are revealing an indifference to what others are prepared to hear. Crosses, we call them. Everyone is carrying a cross. Heavy crosses. Perhaps part of the Christian life involves recognizing that reality at the core of every person's life and a delicate balance of being careful not to add to the burden, but to be open, at the same time, to allowing Christ to work through us, if he chooses, to help them bear it...for just a little while. - Amy Welborn at Via Media

I don't understand the notion of raising taxes on the rich. Personally, I've never received a family-sustaining regular paycheck from a poor person. If the President has his way, fewer families will receive them from rich people. - Bill of "Summa Minutiae"

The crisis is systemic. It is the financial sector. They should have fixed that first, not last. - Joe Scarborough tweet

In his column in the February 15, 2009 bulletin, our pastor writes, "it is difficult to understand why some Catholics excuse themselves from Mass for the slightest reason." In the same column he goes on to say "As part of the Lenten observance, I will not be telling a 'story' until after Easter." The story refers to the joke he tells just before the final blessing. He once explained that jokes aren't supposed to be inserted into the Mass, so he calls it a "story"….At last Sunday's 11:00 a.m. Mass he underscored a homiletic point by noting the translation of the Gospel we're using is no longer the prescribed one. - longsuffering Terrence of "The Provincial Emails"

If the modern world will not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, the modern world will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage a nasty thing in a nice way. - Chesterton, via John at the Inn a the End of the World

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others. - Blaise Pascal

Self-righteous authoritarians naturally gravitate to venues where they can impose their wills on others (well, and also Blogspot), but the loudest voices aren't always the best measure of the way of life from which those voices come. - Tom of Disputations

Origen has his own image to express the difficulty of working out the proper approach to reading the Bible. When preparing to offer a commentary on the Psalms he tells of a tradition handed down to him by his Hebrew teacher.

The Hebrew said that the whole divinely inspired Scripture may be likened, because of its obscurity, to many locked rooms in our house. By each room is placed a key, but not the one that corresponds to it, so that the keys are scattered about beside the rooms, none of them matching the room by which it is placed. It is a difficult task to find the keys and match them to the rooms that they can open. We therefore know the Scriptures that are obscure only by taking the points of departure for understanding them from another place because they have their interpretive principle scattered among them.

- R. R. Reno

Now, I'm all for people seeking privacy when they're having sex. (It's not something I want to watch other people doing.) But I don't think there's some right to privacy regarding whether one is known to be sexually active, because sex is an act that has social ramifications. It creates a bond between the actors (whether acknowledged or not). It's the cheapest, most efficient way for societies to obtain new citizens, so in a sense I find it rather odd that the government should have been subsidizing this in the first place. If anyone should be subsidizing birth control for female college students, it's the guys who benefit from it. - score one for Mrs Darwin