Saturday, May 26, 2018

"Wherever you are on earth, however long you remain on earth, the Lord is near, do not be anxious about anything."

"So, brethren, rejoice in the Lord, not in the world.  That is, rejoice in the truth, not in wickedness; rejoice in the hope of eternity, not in the fading flower of vanity.  That is the way to rejoice.  Wherever you are on earth, however long you remain on earth, the Lord is near, do not be anxious about anything."

"Ita gaudete:  et ubicumque, et quamdiucumque hic fueritis, Dominus in proximo est, nihil solliciti fueritis."

     St. Augustine, Sermo 171.5 =PL 38, col. 935 (933-935), as translated in the Office of Readings for St. Philip Neri.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

"if theology does lay special claim to gaps, i.e., to exceptions to an explanation in terms of law, then regulated events cannot be seen as direct and living acts of God in the way that miracles are."

     Wolfhart Pannenberg, paraphrasing Paul Althaus, Systematic theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994 [1991]), 71n174.  There are some very nice statements on this page in the body, too.  Pannenberg continues as follows:
     The only safeguard against the argument that theology is here again claiming a gap in what is normal as the basis of its description of God's action in natural occurrences is to show first that [1] contingency is constitutive for the very concept of laws in nature, and then to claim that [2] contingency thus applies not merely to events that are not regulated by law but to all events in general.  We can do this if we show that [3] the contingency of each event is the result of the irreversibility of time.  If this argument holds good, only a contesting of the irreversibility of time can weaken the thesis that all events are contingent [(italics mine)].

Deus et familia

"Only God and Guy knew the massive and singular quality of Mr Crouchback's family pride."  Yet "all his pride of family was a schoolboy hobby compared with his religious faith."

     Evelyn Waugh, Men at arms, Prologue ("Sword of honour"); The Sword of honour trilogy, Everyman's Library 173 (New York:  Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994 [1952]), 31, 32.