'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.'

'I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve.'

-Robert Frost, The Death of a Hired Man

“After forty years of writing books, I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.”

-Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

“What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality. Pastors learn to pacify rather than preach to their Ananiases and Sapphiras. We say we do it out of "love." Usually, we do it as a means of keeping everyone as distant from everyone else as possible. You don’t get into my life and I will not get into yours.”

-Stanley Hauerwas

Real? Who wants real?
I know I don't want it. I want magic!
Magic! Yes! That's what I want!
That's what I try to give to people.
I do mis-
Represent things.
I don't tell
The truth. But I tell
What ought to be the truth . . .
What it ought to be.
Yes, magic. Magic's what I try to give to people.
If that's a sin,
If that is such a sin
Then let me be damned for it!
Don't turn on that light.
It'll all look so ugly in that light.
Why not see by candlelight . . .
Or moonlight, or by starlight?
They are bright enough to see by . . .
Sometimes too bright.
Don't turn on that light.

-I Want Magic!

A loss of something ever felt I –
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was - of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect

A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out –

Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is --
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinquent Palaces --

And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my Forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven –

-Emily Dickinson

It is wrong to use terms that imply those labeled are defined by their actions or feelings.

-internet monk

Every Riven Thing

by Christian Wiman

God goes, belonging to every riven thing He's made
Sing his being simply by being
The thing it is:
Stone and tree and sky,
Man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He's made,
Means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
Trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing He's made
There is given one shade
Shaped exactly to the thing itself:
Under the tree a darker tree;
Under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
The things that bring Him near,
Made the mind that makes Him go.
A part of what man knows,
Apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing He's made.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”

- Victor Hugo

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats, from Ode to a Grecian Urn

If loving her is heartache for me,
And if holding her means I have to bleed
Then I am a martyr, and love is to blame.
She is the healing, and I am the pain.

-Trading Yesterday

The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again.

-William Deresiewicz

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.

-W.H. Auden (yes, again)

I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ - and certainly not for Christ which I've heard some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I'm somewhat familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in the Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days - the prayer book is so much more orderly.

-A Prayer for Owen Meany

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

-George Herbert, from The Agony

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it.

-Christian Wiman, Gazing Into the Abyss

-The Nietzsche Family Circus

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not-
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught-
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

-Shelley, from To a Sky-Lark

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

-Sidney J. Harris

-photo

He praised his God
for the expertise
of his torturer and his chef.
---
Lonely he may be
but, each time he bolts his door
the last thing at night,
his heart rejoices: "No one
can interfere with me now."
-
He woke in the small hours,
dismayed by a wilderness
of hostile thoughts.
-
Thoughts of his own death,
like the distant roll
of thunder at a picnic.

-W.H. Auden

A key to the street each convict has,
but the Asphalt Lands are lawless marches
where gangs clash and cops turn
robber-barons: reckless he
who walks after dark in that wilderness.

-W.H. Auden, from City Without Walls

-post secret

“Our moral judgments and evaluations, too, are only images and fantasies about a physiological process that is unknown to us... all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text.”

- Nietzsche

"the fiction writer does not need to solve a problem so much as state the problem correctly." (197)

-Terry Bain

Letters For God.

The Israeli postal service sorts over 2 million pieces of mail daily, and inevitably some of those letters come addressed to God. Rather than consign the letters to bins of undeliverable mail, letters addressed to God are collected and deposited at the Western Wall a few times a year.
Postal authorities consider the letters private conversations with God and do not open them. Letters come from all corners of the globe,

Birth name:

Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland

(someone's indecisive)

This guy writes the longest sentences ever:

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal and is justified over against the latter not as subordinate but superior to it, yet in such a way, mind you, that it is the single individual who, after having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now through the universal becomes the single individual who as the particular is superior to it; [faith is this paradox] that the single individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute.

-Kierkegaard as Johann de silencio

Brian McLaren's article on Wheaton.

Married to the Sea

1.	collateral misinformation
	When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the "error" is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation. I changed the scientific classification of red foxes last night in order to win an argument with Judy. I hope some stupid High School student didn't suffer from collateral misinformation.

Prayer to Every God
(from somewhere in the non-Israelite ancient Near East,
I'm confused by footnotes.)

The transgression I have committed I do not know;
The sin I have done I do not know;
The forbidden thing I have eaten I do not know;
The prohibited place on which I have set foot I do not know;
The god whom I know or do not know has oppressed me;I am troubled, I am overwhelmed, I cannot see.

Man is dumb; he knows nothing;
Mankind, everyone that exists-what does he know?
Whether he is committing sin or doing good, he does not even know.

Father at the wars,
Mother, tongue-tied with shyness,
struggling to tell him
the Facts of Life he dared not
tell her he knew already.

-W.H. Auden

History should not be seen naively as an attempt to recount what really happened. The Epistemological question concerns the extent to which we could ever know what really happened... In one sense one could perhaps go so far as to claim that there is no such thing as history, only the recounted interpretation of the past.

-Dr. John H. Walton

Marc Johns

So if the devil wear Prada,
Adam Eve wear Nada,
I'm in between, but way more fresher.

-Kanye West

Portrait of Igor Stravinsky by Picasso

prayer
by Aaron Belz

Shall I
compare
myself
to a dog?

If so,
it’s true—
sometimes
I paw my
master’s
leg. And

sometimes
he plays
with me.

It would be difficult to discuss with ancients the concepts of divine intervention, because in their worldview deity was too integrated into the cosmos to intervene in it. For the most part, deity is on the inside, not the outside. All experience was religious experience, all law was spiritual in nature, all duties were duties to the gods, all events had deity as their cause. Life was religion and religion could not be compartmentalized within life...

In the ancient world something came into existence when it was separated out as a distinct entity, given a function, and given a name.

-Dr. John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought

obstaculum

Have daylight mercy on my midnight soul.

-Frederick Buechner, Godric

Droid Rage

Newsworthy

The Broken Covenant
from the book of Jeremiah

Like a cage full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
therefore they have become great and rich;
they have grown fat and sleek.
They know no bounds in deeds of evil;
they judge not with justice
the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper,
and they do not defend the rights of the needy.
Shall I not punish them for these things?
declares the Lord,
and shall I not avenge myself
on a nation such as this?
An appalling and horrible thing
has happened in the land:
the prophets prophesy falsely,
and the priests rule at their direction;
my people love to have it so,
but what will you do when the end comes?

They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
saying, 'Peace, peace,'
when there is no peace.

The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; with a point of diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart

The battle spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more people that day than the sword.

-here.

Remember, my friends, what a handful of trumpet players
did to the famous fabled walls of Jericho,
oh, billiard parlor walls come a-tumblin' down!
-The Music Man

photo

Threadless

“We for the most part shy off being human because if we are really human we will be crucified.”
-Herbert McCabe

(via I have no idea why I subscribe to this blog... it's ...boring)

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
- James Joyce

the main problem at any high school is not substance abuse, although that is the message our students unfortunately get. It is not sex, either. It is a lack of belief that what is being done is important, and students and teachers are both culpable.

-Aaron Belz
via an ecstasy of particulars

Great Mugging Escapes—No. 204: The War on Terror
By Pasha Malla

...See that light glinting up there by the water tower? That's "the Claw." He's got a hook for a hand—lost it in Belfast in the '80s. I give the signal and he'll put a bullet through your ear. Roger that, Red Dog. Two minutes to green light. Lock and load. Over.

Letter of Recommendation for Rick Stoeckel, Who Was Homeschooled

By Rick Stoeckel

...When I asked Ricky's father for a comment to include in this recommendation, he stated, "Ricky's all right." If you knew Ricky's father, you would realize what a great accolade that is. I second that notion. For all his faults and imperfections and disappointments and failures, our Ricky is all right.

If you have any questions regarding Ricky's worthiness or character, please feel free to contact me. I am available anytime except Saturday mornings, when I go grocery shopping, and Monday nights, when Ricky's father and I hold our own PTA meetings: just the two of us. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Rick's Mom

God has put this Word into the mouth of others in order that it may be communicated to us. When one person is struck by the Word, he speaks it to others. God has willed that we should seek and find his living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth.

He needs a brother as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain; his brother’s is sure.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer
via Elanor

"Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama."