‘The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome.’

‘That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who’d never heard Of any world where promises were kept Or one could weep because another wept.’ I had forgotten how powerful Auden could be when really on his game.

‘Obviously, while I love all, I must, like Christ, have a special love for the poor. At the last judgement, we shall all be judged by the treatment we have given to Christ, to Christ in the person of those who are hungry or thirsty, who are dirty, wounded, and oppressed.’

Beyond M23: Addressing the Underlying Drivers of the DRC Conflict africacenter.org/spotlight/dr...

Beyond M23: Addressing the Underlying Drivers of the DRC Conflict

For peace with M23 and stability in eastern DRC, address issues of citizenship, security sector reform, and mineral sector transparency.

africacenter.org

„Im Anfang ist die Beziehung.“ In the beginning is Relation. Martin Buber, „Ich und Du“ - 1923.

‘In another world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’ John Henry Cardinal Newman —An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine

OK, I’d be the first to concede that this volume is about as niche as a book can be. But it’s *really* interesting and I’ve really been enjoying reading it.📚👍

‘People must act for others, with others, by others. They cannot arrange for themselves the affairs of their own life. Our existences are so connected that it is impossible to conceive a single action that does not extend in infinite undulations, quite beyond its intended end.’

‘Man is always most inhuman, not when he is unconsciously driven by natural impulses, but when he imagines his natural impulses and his relative values to be instruments of some absolute good.’

Hvad er angest? Det er den næste Dag. ‘What is anxiety? It is the next day.’ —Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses

‘There is only one Thou that by its nature never stops being Thou for us. The person who knows God also well knows God’s remoteness and the torment of barrenness in the anxious heart; but that person never knows God’s absence.’ —Martin Buber, „Ich und Du” - 1923

‘And know this in all the seriousness of truth: Without *It* a person cannot live; but whoever lives with *It* alone is not a person.’ —Martin Buber, „Ich und Du“ - 1923

‘God is not enthroned at some unreachable metaphysical distance. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living—near to us . . . not only spiritually but, one may say, also physically, in those who are closest to us and above all in those who are suffering.’ —Ferdinand Ebner

‘It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.’ I think Styron’s account is by far the best extended description of the experience of depression ever written.

Today would have been Will Campbell’s 102nd birthday. The world would be a whole lot better place now if he were still in it.

Remember today the faith, fidelity, and courage of sixteen nuns and lay sisters of the Carmelite community of Compiègne.

I bought this little book of Schleiermacher🐐 excerpts way back when I was in seminary. It was my first exposure to FDES’s German, but at the time the reason I actually got it was to read Barth’s famous afterword in which he gives a (grudging) nod in FDES’s direction.

Happy Bastille Day! Vive la France!🇫🇷 Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé!🇫🇷🎉🎉🎉

‘So merciful love can descend to everyone. We believe that it does. Can we assume that there are souls perpetually closed to such love? In principle this can’t be rejected. In reality it can become infinitely improbable—just through what preparatory grace can effect in the soul.’

‘[T]he life of faith is not the acceptance of doctrine any more than the life of the natural man is the acceptance of mathematical equations, or the life of the artist is the acceptance of aesthetic canons.’

[The] unique aim of philosophy is to assure full liberty of the mind, guarantee autonomous life of thought, and determine independently conditions which establish its realm. So can there be any connection between philosophy and Christianity, since the one seems to exclude the other?

‘[The] sole true Thou of the I is God’ . . . . —Ferdinand Ebner Ebner is interesting. He, Buber, and Rosenzweig, independently developed the Ich-Du theme in the early 20th century. Chronologically Ebner’s work slightly precedes Buber’s. Little of it has been translated.

Gordon Kaufman died 15 years ago this month. He deserves remembering. Here he is at an HDS faculty retreat in the mid-70s. John Carman standing facing him and Dieter Georgi sitting with outstretched legs between them. (The handsome fellow in the window is me.😉😇)

🔥‘. . . the intolerable pretensions of saints who have forgotten that they are sinners.’🔥 —Reinhold Niebuhr, ND2:130

‘But my real concern was and is a philosophical one: in question is not what we do, not what we ought to do, but what happens to us beyond our wanting and doing.’ —Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Truth and Method*, Foreword to the Second German edition (1965)

‘If it is true that every philosophy is an expression of a society, then it should react back on society and have certain effects, both positive and negative. The extent to which it reacts back is precisely the measure of its historical importance.’ —Gramsci, Prison Notebooks 3

We reject the false doctrine: As though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords — areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him. Barmen, 1934

‘What is amazing in Kierkegaard is that despite his lack of the tools for interpreting unconscious material—which tools have been available in their most complete form only since Freud—he so keenly and profoundly anticipated modern psychoanalytic insight into anxiety.’

‘The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.’ —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms, Chapter 34

Original Child Bomb —Thomas Merton