Joseph > Recent Status Updates

There were among the tribes in the fighting zone a nervous enthusiasm common, I suppose, to all national risings, but strangely disquieting to one from a land so long delivered that national freedom had become like the water in our mouths, tasteless.

He led me to an inner court, on whose further side, framed between the uprights of a black doorway, stood a white figure waiting tensely for me. I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek-the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown head-cloth bound with a brilliant...cord.

We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.

Can we invent a time machine so Lawrence can teach the internet how to properly use English?

When you dedicate your book to Saudi Arabia, with a love poem, you're doing something right.

"Why are you the one who saves the world?"
"...People want to apply [Einstein's] relativity to everything, even morality. They would have you believe that there are no absolutes in this world, that everything can only be defined in relationship to everything else. And that's well and good for them, but not for me."

Kudos to Castle for properly capitalizing the elision of The Divine Name in a quote from the Hebrew Scriptures. (I know Castle's not a real person)

We started talking about the horrible things people did to each other, about war, and about the terrible irony that mankind was smart enough to be able to design these weapons and still dumb enough to use them on each other.

Any half-wit troglodyte with Google Earth can get a pretty good gander at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters, which rests on a leafy campus just across from Washington, D.C., alongside a sweeping bend in the Potomac River. A slightly more sophisticated operator can figure out which building house the National Clandestine Service, one of the CIA's more shadowy branches.

Physiologists have identified the two possible reactions to a threatening stimulus as being fight or flight. But those are, in fact, merely the instinctive responses, the ones gifted to humans by their simian ancestors. Fancying themselves members of a more evolved species, H. sapiens have learned to overcome those base, brutish urges. They are polite, civilized, especially when surrounded by other H. sapiens.

Bookstore Fail: I bought a copy of The Selected Writings of Hildegard of Bingen, turns out that inside it's The Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus. Gives new meaning to "Never judge a book by its cover."

What happens when I get to read through the New York Times book review? My "to read" list gets much longer.

Freedom, therefore, is essential to vocation-a freedom which, when it gives a positive response, appears as a deep personal adherence, as a loving gift-or rather as a gift given back to the giver who is God who calls, an oblation: "The call"-Paul VI once said-"is as extensive as the response. There cannot be vocations unless they be free; that is, unless they be spontaneous offerings of oneself...

Nor should the prophetic significance of priestly poverty be forgotten, so urgently needed in affluent and consumeristic societies: "A truly poor priest is indeed a specific sign of separation from, disavowal of, and non-submission to the tyranny of a contemporary world which puts all its trust in money and in material security."

The lure of the so called "consumer society" is so strong among young people that they become totally dominated and imprisoned by an individualistic, materialistic and hedonistic interpretation of human existence.

So many good quotes, curse you, character limit!