January 2011
15 posts
The Question Dies Away
“I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. Long did I hate you, long did I fear you.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
I recently finished C.S. Lewis’ novel, Till We Have Faces, a...
An Otherness that Bites
In Wayne C Booth’s splendid defense of a return to ethical criticism in literature, The Company We Keep (thank you Gaelan for the recommendation), he vindicates a literary pursuit of “the other” in reading, not merely as a nod to fashionable moral subjectivism, nor in deference to difference as a value in and of itself, but “as among the grandest of hunts we are...
Democracy and Tradition
“I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. […] Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the...
On Ethical Values in Narratives
Toward the end of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience he raises the question of what to do about the conflicts among the astonishingly divergent religious beliefs he has traced. Why do we not assume, he asks, “that the lives of all men should show identical religious elements?….[I]s the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds...
All the Good About
Do not say: ‘I do not know what is right, therefore I am not to blame when I fail to do it.’ For if you did all the good about which you do know, what you should do next would then become clear to you, as if you were passing through a house from one room to another. It is not helpful to know what comes later before you have done what comes first. For knowledge without action...
Reflections on Theophany: the body, the soul, the...
A few nights ago, after returning from divine liturgy on the eve of the Theophany feast, I took a long hard look in the mirror (literally). My hair was flat and frizzy, my makeup running, my clothes damp. I looked bettered, pathetic, old even. I had just come in from the rain, but I had also been crying in the car (a common occurrence these days, considering my current circumstances), and had...
A review of Marilynne Robinsons's sequel of sorts... →
“It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgment of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grace. It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition. What a strange old book it is.”
“His restlessness took on the aspect of virtue, rousing him out of bed in the...”
– Marilynne Robinson, Home
“Later, I stumbled to my bed
All alone in the branches
I laid in the dark...”
– Joanna Newsom
Women Laughing Alone with Salad →
“What the morning buries, the Lord brings to life in the evening; and what the...”
– Nikolai Velimirovic 