2/28/08

The separation of church and state is a source of strength, but the conscience of our nation does not call for separation between men of state and faith in the Supreme Being.

-Lyndon B. Johnson

2/27/08

KNOW then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, 5
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; 10
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall; 15
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

-Alexander Pope
(I've never understood humanism better than after reading this)

2/26/08


The first Photoshop icon
People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

-David Mamet

2/25/08

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

-E. M. Cioran

2/24/08

The great writers usually break a few rules, and the greater the writer the larger the transgressions...

Forgive me if I got carried away back there. Sometimes we scribblers do indeed become drunk with power.

All books are either dreams or swords.

-
Amy Lowell
You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.

-W.H. Auden

2/23/08



The Temptation of Adam
by Josh Ritter

...I never had to learn to love her like I learned to love the Bomb,
she just came along and started to ignore me...

We could hold each other close and stay up every night
looking up into the dark like it's the night sky.
Pretend this giant missile is an old oak tree instead
and carve our name in hearts into the warhead.

Oh Marie there's something tells me things just won't work out above,
that our love would live a half-life on the surface.
So at night while you are sleeping
I hold you closer just because
as our time grows short I get a little nervous.

I think about the Big One, W.W.I.I.I.
Would we ever really care the world had ended?
You could hold me here forever like you're holding me tonight
I think about that great big button and I'm tempted.

2/22/08

2/20/08


Wealth and Religiosity
via More than 95 Theses

2/19/08


By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 A.M.
by Jack Gilbert

For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.
Each one of us has... an inner life story that we spend all our lives telling to ourselves alone.... our inner life story is the content of our most private level of consciousness. It is the actual reason, the final basis of the decisions we make--decisions that are often so baffling to others.

-John Charles Cooper, Fantasy and the Human Spirit

2/18/08

2/14/08

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.
-John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

2/13/08

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

-T.S. Eliot
Thomas in Murder in the Cathedral

2/11/08

Unholy we sang this morning, and prayed
as if we were not broken, crooked
the Christ-figure hung, splayed
on bloodied beams above us;
devious God, dweller in shadows,
mercy on us;
immortal, cross-shattered Christ—
your gentling grace down upon us.

-"Mercy" from Manhandling the Deity, by John F. Deane

-photo

2/10/08

a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting
- three hundred million people all with the same face.

-George Orwell, 1984

Photo - BenGood

2/9/08

But today, if you will hear His voice,
Today He will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light:
He can bring thy summer out of winter,
Tho' thou have no spring.

-John Donne, from a sermon preached in 1624, put to music by Imogen Holst
Great is the Lord!
The dawn is but a pale reflection of the hem of his garments

-Franz Schubert, Gott in der Natur
Whenever I try to Read through the Bible in a Year, I Always Get Stuck in Leviticus

Eden, the original sacred space, is restored in us as God's presence has taken up his dwelling in his people... Keep the space pure. (123)

-Old Testament Today
The true poem is the poet's mind.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

2/6/08

On Turning Ten
by Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

2/5/08

I don’t believe in the God who is so identified with a denomination that someone can say “We speak for God,” and no one laughs.

-Internet Monk
- Vincent Laforet, who has an uncanny way of making us all look like toys.

2/4/08

"For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand."

-C.S. Lewis


"Meanwhile, where is God?...But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?"

-Lewis again, A Grief Observed
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who walk into a room and say, There you are and those who say, Here I am.

-Abigail Van Buren

2/2/08

"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about."

-W. H. Auden
"I’m so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion...

...it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervor of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working."

-Daniel C. Dennett