These Beautiful Bones Quotes

“That’s the sacramental worldview. It’s a worldview where heaven comes to earth, grace penetrates matter, and every individual’s story is part of the cosmic story of salvation history. It’s a worldview where everything has a meaning, everyone has a purpose, and every moment is accounted for in a Divine Plan. It is, ultimately, a worldview that says Sartre was wrong and Flannery O’Connor was right. Hell isn’t other people. Other people are Christs.1 Without the sacramental worldview, there would be no plays by Shakespeare or concertos by Bach, no stories by Chesterton or mythologies by Tolkien. There would be no St. Peter’s, no Notre Dame, no Sistine Chapel, no David, no university system, no scientific method. The sacramental worldview made all that and more possible as gifted men and women strove to convey in words, music, marble, and methods the divine splendor of the world in which they lived. Then, that stopped. The Modernist Prism”
― Emily Stimpson, These Beautiful Bones: An Everyday Theology of the Body

“as modernism sees it, the human body is nothing more than matter, to be molded, manipulated, and used. Devoid of divine purpose or meaning, it’s left for each of us, as individuals, to decide what we want to do with our body. We can ignore it and neglect it, or we can indulge its every appetite. We can nip it and tuck it, remaking it into whatever shape we desire, or we can cut it, starve it, and put it to rest when age, pain, or disease become too much to bear. We can give it away, again and again, to anyone we fancy in whatever ways we fancy, and we can do what we like with any new life that comes of that giving. When the body is seen as mere matter, anything goes. The body, however, isn’t mere matter. That’s a modernist fiction. Rather, as the Catholic anthropology of the theology of the body reminds us, man is a union of body and soul, made in the image of God. Which means our bodies are us. Your body is you. My body is me.”
― Emily Stimpson, These Beautiful Bones: An Everyday Theology of the Body