Theology is man’s understanding of God; the Gospels are God’s understanding of God.
Your phrases should be alive with men and women, filled with stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals. A wholly abstract style is always bad. Concrete examples alone furnish style. —Alain, quoted by André Maurois
To be a Christian is to live in the now and the forever.
God becomes man, not man becomes God.
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 The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties.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?