Settled Things Strange

bookmania: from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:06:47 -0400

from To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Poetry and Presence | Allison Backous Troy

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:28:00 -0400

Poetry and Presence | Allison Backous Troy:

What Oliver’s work does for my minister friend — as it can do for us all — is more than point to a message or theme that was meant to inspire. Poetry engages us in a moment of meeting with a scene, a world, a person; poetry invites us to partake, to be fully present, to move beyond medium and message to flesh and blood, word and communion.

When it is right, poetry evokes a sense of the sacramental. When read aright, poetry can help us recover a sacramental sense of presence in the world around us.

1wantchange: Shepherds huts

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:05:34 -0400

1wantchange:

Shepherds huts

Fruitfulness | Alissa Wilkinson

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 08:27:00 -0400

Fruitfulness | Alissa Wilkinson:

The best writer, I’m starting to think, sees writing as a predominately spiritual practice, not just a predominately work-producing one. She is the one who experiences through her work the growing process that makes her into a full, strong, richly fruitful person, who bears her fruit in her season. Her leaf also shall not wither—and, incidentally, whatever she does will prosper.

"His contemporaries most frequently commented on Thomas’s humility, a virtue little prized in our..."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 22:22:36 -0400

“His contemporaries most frequently commented on Thomas’s humility, a virtue little prized in our times, since we seem unable to distinguish the humble person’s self-evaluation from what we call low self-esteem. In consequence, self-assertion takes on the appearance of a virtue, merely by way of contrast with that mistaken conception of humility. Humility, in the sense that his contemporaries observed its presence in Thomas, had more to do with that peculiarly difficult form of vulnerability, which consists in being entirely open to the discovery of the truth, especially to the truth about oneself. One might say, likewise, that what humility is to the moral life, lucidity is to the intellectual—an openness to contestation, the refusal to hide behind the opacity of the obscure, a vulnerability to refutation to which one is open simply as a result of being clear enough to be seen, if wrong, to be wrong. We might well say, then, that Thomas was fearlessly clear, unafraid to be shown to be wrong, and correspondingly angered by those among his colleagues, especially in the University of Paris, who in his view refused to play the game on a field leveled by lucidity and openness equal in degree of honesty to the requirements of the intellectual life. And yet, even in Thomas’s anger there is nothing personal. His is the anger of a true teacher observing students to have been betrayed by colleagues. It has no more to do with self-assertion than his humility has to do with lack of self-worth.”

- Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (via wesleyhill)

"A poem has already been brought into the world to some extent when it’s typed. I feel more like an..."

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:30:27 -0400

““A poem has already been brought into the world to some extent when it’s typed. I feel more like an editor than a poet after that.””

- Mark Strand (via theparisreview)

"To speak of “God” properly—in a way, that is, consonant with the teachings of..."

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:09:00 -0400

“

To speak of “God” properly—in a way, that is, consonant with the teachings of orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Bahá’í, much of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite ground of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.

God so understood is neither some particular thing posed over against the created universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a being, at least not in the way that a tree, a clock, or a god is; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are. He is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom all things live and move and have their being. He may be said to be “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of finite things, but also may be called “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity underlying all things.

”

- David Bentley Hart | God, Gods, and Fairies | First Things

"One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes..."

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 14:01:00 -0400

“One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes
physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and
intense vitality combined.”

- Virginia Woolf on reading Marcel Proust

"Naming things is the crowning glory of man."

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 08:33:00 -0400

“Naming things is the crowning glory of man.”

- Robert Farrar Capon

"Can poets (can men in television) Be saved? It is not easy To believe in unknowable justice Or pray..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:39:11 -0400

“Can poets (can men in television)
Be saved? It is not easy
To believe in unknowable justice
Or pray in the name of a love
Whose name one’s forgotten: libera
Me, libera C (dear C)
And all poor s-o-b’s who never
Do anything properly, spare
Us in the youngest day when all are
Shaken awake, facts are facts,
(And I shall know exactly what happened
Today between noon and three)
That we, too, may come to the picnic
With nothing to hide, join the dance
As it moves in perichoresis,
Turns about the abiding tree.”

- W. H. Auden, from “Compline,” in Horae Canonicae

cabinporn: Ishawooa Mesa Ranch in 1905 in South Fork Valley,...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:35:58 -0400

cabinporn:

Ishawooa Mesa Ranch in 1905 in South Fork Valley, Wyoming, USA.

invisibleforeigner: New Romantic - Laura Marling This.

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 21:24:38 -0400

invisibleforeigner:

New Romantic - Laura Marling

This.

"At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by..."

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 21:27:00 -0400

“At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.”

- Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 141 (via recycledsoul)

"My life is a reading list."

Fri, 31 May 2013 13:52:26 -0400

“My life is a reading list.”

- John Irving (via bookmania)

"At the time of my baptism the church’s teaching on homosexuality was one of the ones I understood..."

Fri, 31 May 2013 00:02:32 -0400

“

At the time of my baptism the church’s teaching on homosexuality was one of the ones I understood the least. I thoroughly embarrassed myself in a conversation with one of my relatives, who tried to figure out why I was joining this repressive religion. I tried to explain something about how God could give infertile heterosexual couples a baby if He wanted to, and my relative, unsurprisingly, asked why He couldn’t give a gay couple a baby. The true answer was that I didn’t understand the teaching, but had agreed to accept it as the cost of being Catholic. To receive the Eucharist I had to sign on the dotted line (they make you say, “I believe all that the Catholic Church believes and teaches” when they bring you into the fold), and I longed intensely for the Eucharist, so I figured, everybody has to sacrifice something. God doesn’t promise that He’ll only ask you for the sacrifices you agree with and understand.

At the moment I do think I understand the Church’s teaching better than I did then—but check back with me in a few years. Right now, the Biblical witness seems pretty clear. Both opposite-sex and same-sex love are used, in the Bible, as images of God’s love. The opposite-sex love is found in marriage—sexually exclusive marriage, an image which recurs not only in the Song of Songs but in the prophets and in the New Testament—and the same-sex love is friendship. Both of these forms of love are considered real and beautiful; neither is better than the other. But they’re not interchangeable. Moreover, Genesis names sexual difference as the only difference which was present in Eden. There were no racial differences, no age difference, no children and therefore no parents. Regardless of how literally you want to take the creation narratives, the Bible sets apart sexual difference as a uniquely profound form of difference. Marriage, as the union of man and woman, represents communion with the Other in a way which makes it an especially powerful image of the way we can commune with the God who remains Other. That’s a quick and dirty summary, but it seems to me more responsive to the texts, more willing to defer to historical Christian witness, and more attuned to the importance and meaning of our bodies than most of the defenses I’ve read of Christian gay marriage.

”

- Eve Tushnet, “I’m Gay, but I’m Not Switching to a Church That Supports Gay Marriage” (via wesleyhill)

"Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at..."

Mon, 27 May 2013 21:48:22 -0400

“Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another “until death,” are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, “die” into their union with one another as a soul “dies” into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing — and our time is proving that this is so.”

- Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community” (via ayjay)

"Volunteer sentences are the relics of your education And the desire to emulate the grown-up,..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 09:19:59 -0400

“Volunteer sentences are the relics of your education
And the desire to emulate the grown-up, workaday prose that surrounds you,
Which is made overwhelmingly of sentences that are banal and structurally thoughtless.”

- Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing, page 46

"You’re always giving, my therapist said. You have to learn how to take. Whenever you meet a..."

Sat, 25 May 2013 09:01:13 -0400

“You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a young woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again,
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.”

- Hal Sirowitz, “Lending Out Books”

"Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:40:45 -0400

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.”

- Paul Goodman

"My brother and I grew up with stories, both oral and written. The stories were so compelling to me..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:58:27 -0400

“

My brother and I grew up with stories, both oral and written. The stories were so compelling to me as a child that I thought, until I was pretty close to adulthood, that I could remember things that happened before I was born. This gave me the sense that I have never lost, of living partly in the past and of loving men and woman that I did not know. I expect, although I can’t know, that many of our stories would have been passed down whether or not we lived in Henry County. But I know that the daily reminders of sight, sounds and smells bring up those stories over and over again and so their power and influence has strengthened in our lives and my brother and I have passed them on to our children.

Even better, our children have heard these stories from their grandfather. If we had not lived here to be reminded and to remember maybe those stories would have been forgotten. If my father and his father had moved away maybe the place would have been lost to me and to my children. Of course, every generation makes its own choices and my children will make theirs but Henry County is a possibility for them with an unbroken line of stories handed down for eight generations.

”

- Mary Berry, who writes a lot like her father—which is to say, beautifully. (via giftsoutright)