More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
another example of how the art we both loved inescapably plunged us back time and again into the realm of our spiritual pasts and journeys,
Yet after what seemed like a second or two from their births, my grandchildren were riveted by the power of art. Something mysterious was happening: two little primate members of one of the oldest surviving placental mammal groups were having an aesthetic experience beyond mere survival.
My brain is not evolved enough to reconcile the collision of my genetic imperative with transcendent experience. My brain recognizes but can’t explain how love and beauty intersect with the prime directive of evolution: survive.
reading @Frank_Schaeffer new marvelous book
a residual echo of my comforting childhood faith about ultimate purpose and eternal life had softened the blow of the losses I found myself lamenting.
Sometimes irrational guilt is all I’ve had standing between me and regret.
Maybe saying “evolution teaches” or “God says” is more or less the same thing: just another way of summing up what we know about ourselves from our collective human primate experience of what works.
bingo @Frank_Schaeffer
What I fear today isn’t God’s theoretical wrath but my family’s palpable sorrow when I hurt them.
I don’t view my embrace of opposites as a kind of agnosticism. I view it as the way things actually are. An agnostic neither believes nor disbelieves in God.
Religious life, at least as it is for me, does not involve anything like a well-defined concept of God, a concept of the kind that a philosopher could live with.
apophatic theology, the theology of not knowing.
Tertullian said, “That which is infinite is known only to itself.”
As for when to die, what to believe, whom to marry, where to live, whether or not God exists, when to have children, and what work to do, I think all this big stuff—stuff as “big as a tree!”—is best left to chance.
When I was raising my children, I pretended to be grown-up Daddy. But alone with my thoughts, I was still just me.
some younger people may think I know something. I do! I know how much I can never know.
Don’t delude yourself: there are no good reasons for anything, just circumstances.
You will always be more than one person. You will always embody contradiction.
I can’t objectively describe reality because I’m trapped in the moving target we call time.
The brain has evolved to do one thing: process our environment and give us an illusion of certainty.
When it comes to drawing meaningful conclusions what use is an earnest five, ten or even twenty-year course of study as seen in the context of a multi-billion-year-old universe?
When we try to extend our narrative into unrelated areas—theology into biology or science into art—we create stories that explain everything and mean nothing.
Is the result of the prayer only about Francis’s health? Or is prayer for Francis also about the health of everyone who loves him? Perhaps the care and love we feel for Francis reflects a love that predates creation. Perhaps learning the meaning of co-suffering love is the point of the creation experiment.
Perhaps learning the meaning of co-suffering love is the point of the creation experiment.
It’s a relief to be understood by someone who knows me better than I know myself.
My world is unthinkable without my daughter.
Sin works out so well sometimes!
fundamentally uncomfortable with just enjoying being human. We’d rather shop than live, acquire than love and stare into a screen than hold each other.
it’s the entire cycle of life that counts. And that cycle is the only real “biological clock” that matters.
when we get down on our knees at eye-level with our babies as they run into our arms, we understand each other perfectly.
“Jesus liked hanging out with women and kids too! So fuck you!”
I know my religious expression is about need. I don’t feel guilty if I don’t take my grandchildren because I think church services will save them but because the Liturgy is a beautiful experience of a larger reality than that offered by our shabby materialist utilitarian culture.
The only reason I still think Jesus means anything is that even the people writing the gospels disapproved of his actions.”
Jesus didn’t take the Jewish scriptures at face value. In fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking relativist who wasn’t even “saved,”
What is the implication of Jesus-centric non-theological, nondogmatic salvation? It’s the abolishing of exclusion of the other as “unsaved.”
According to Jesus, there never was and never will be a “greatest country on earth,” or a “city set on a hill” or a “chosen people.”
It can seem as if Jesus failed to change anything.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news to anyone hooked on apocalyptic fantasies, but things are getting better.
The inclusion of “others” is the greatest ethical insight of Christianity
Whatever you believe about how Jesus left—be it via death, resurrection or flying into the clouds—what he left behind remains: the accelerated pace of the evolution of our ethical consciousness.
The point is that I live as if my experiences are meaningful, notwithstanding religious and secular theologies of human insignificance. I feel significant when I tell my stories, therefore I am.
Scientists and theologians can’t offer better than circular arguments, because there are no other kinds of arguments.
It’s just my means of establishing relationships with people who share my commitment to a liturgical tradition that I am fed by aesthetically and spiritually. Or put it this way: the Dude abides.
The last thing I want is a new and improved “worship experience.”
The last thing I want is for the service to be socially and politically relevant or, worse yet, politicized, as if faith is about who I should vote for according to a moralistic left wing or right wing litmus test.
and found God there, or at least found a happier version of themselves.
We are all recovering from what we’ve experienced in captivity to ourselves.
Where we go to church, or whether we go, isn’t the point. The point is who are we becoming?
How we treat others is the only proof of truth we have.
life is not a step to a better place: life IS the better place, right here and now. It’s too good to be true—and it’s real.
An oral tradition and a rich liturgical expression of divinity lovingly shared in a faith community are much more convincing than words on a page.
Evolution doesn’t demand justice; it demands life.
