Formerly, it was a disgrace to think that humans are like other animals; now it is a grace to think that other animals are like humans.
In the Bible, God repents and man repents.
The Bible shouldn’t be read just as literature, but as literature it is better than most literature.
It is the Lᴏʀᴅ: let him do what seemeth him good. 1 Samuel [1 Kings] 3:18
William James on Transubstantiation
Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them. Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically. I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist. Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value. Since the accidents of the wafer don’t change in the Lord’s supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely. The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties. But tho these don’t alter, a tremendous difference has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed upon the very substance of divinity. The substance-notion breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.
This is the only pragmatic application of the substanceidea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the ‘real presence’ on independent grounds.
—William James, Pragmatism
It is natural to blossom.
Even the children, who were vigorously intimidated during the “lessons of edification,” no longer played in the debonair way natural to healthy and happy youngsters, but shrank as a cur shrinks in expectation of a blow. They flagged as do flowers which have never known sufficient sunlight, but have been kept in semi-darkness. —The Neglected Books Page, The Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin, by Stefan Zweig
The lowest and highest of Jesus' brothers are called to love God.
Dear Liturgists, Should deacons used the orans posture when saying the Our Father at Mass?
Tell the church. In stories and probably in life, dispute are often settled by a rabbi. Do disputing Catholics ever go to their pastor to settle an argument?
In his homily this morning, Fr. Julian A. Davies, OFM, said, “A watchman would tell you, “If you die in mortal sin, you go to Hell.”
Come into my Father’s blessing and inherit the kingdom I have prepared for you from the beginning of creation. Sc. 78, Matthew 25:34
One needn’t become divinized to have eternal life. [Sc. 71, Mark 10:19]]
In Millerton, NY
From *Erasmus of Rotterdam* by Stefan Zweig @waisberg
People who are far from God’s kingdom in life will be far from God’s kingdom in death.
London eye and light, two photos sent to us by someone visiting there.
The gates of hell shall not prevail. Matthew 16:18
Those of us who believe in Jesus should not for a moment consider what would make us believe that the gates of hell have prevailed. The Jews lost their First Temple and then lost their Second Temple and now have no Temple, but there are still Jews.
Not art appreciation, but more important.
We ought to read in such a manner that we appropriate from what we have read the moral lesson that lies hidden behind it. —Georg Brandes
For those of us who are not practitioners, the most important thing we can get from a work of art is a moral lesson. This is true even if we and others get different lessons, and even if the work or the artist’s intention isn’t explicitly moral and the moral lesson is, as Brandes writes, “hidden”. And indeed, in most works of art, the moral lesson is not a moral but a vision.
The Church must find a place to stand to move the world.