We've got the bomb

"the Catholic faithful (and all the faithful everywhere) know that, if need be, out of the depths of Parnassus the oracle will return into the world:  the ex cathedra utterance of the Magisterium.  The Church has the bomb."

Sheldon Vanauken, "The English Channel:  between Canterbury and Rome," in The new Catholics:  contemporary converts tell their stories, ed. Dan O'Neill (New York, NY:  Crossroad, 1989), 129.  There is an immaturity about most of these essays, though not this one and "A bizarre conversion," by John C. Cort.

God, too

"Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand."

George Eliot, Middlemarch, book 1, chap. 11 (GBWW, 2nd ed. (1990), vol. 46, p. 247).

Original sin

"I had read elsewhere of the misery of the Sioux's Cheyenne allies when they were attacked by the army in the winter campaign of 1877.  But I'd never read that, as Powers reveals, the army's Shoshone scouts began howling with rage and grief when they discovered, among the Cheyenne's effects, a bag containing the right hands of a dozen Shoshone children killed by the Cheyenne on a recent raid.  Though the arrival of white people increased the darkness, Powers shows that it existed before.  As an old woman at Pine Ridge told a Yale anthropologist in 1931, she would like to go back to the days before the reservation, 'if we could be free from attack by the enemy.'"

Ian Frazier, "The magic of Crazy Horse" (a review of The killing of Crazy Horse, by Thomas Powers), The New York review of books 58, no. 3 (February 24, 2011), 34.

"colonies of divinity and secret agents of heaven"

"Faith claims to have 'overcome' the world, but the victory is pursued in steadily hostile territory by colonies of divinity and secret agents of heaven.  Monastic and Utopian communities make up the colonies, and images of reversal and renewal comprise the secret agents.  Even the Church as firmly established in the seats of power still sings 'He hath put down the mighty from their seat and exalted them of low degree.'"

David Martin as interviewed by Rupert Shortt in God's advocates: Christian thinkers in conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 164.  "I want to make a distinction here between the ironic and the innocent.  A Christianity conscious of its own whispering gallery of contrary notions will generate irony on account of the gap between hope and reality.  But Enlightenment (as the very word suggests) seeks a point of innocence from which to judge where lies the source of corruption.  Bien pensant thinking, understood as the infinite resource of the high-minded, elevates itself to the secure ground of innocence to comment on the ubiquity of failure and identify its source, which in the cases already cited [(Dawkins, Pullman, certain forms of feminism, Marxism, etc., from p. 161)] may be religion itself. . . . [¶] There is no innocence, and the closest we may come to the perfect society and Yeats' 'ceremonies of innocence' is in the special liminal time of liturgy" (166).

Martin on the relation of mind to brain

"the latest reduction claims that 'science' has 'explained' inspiration through observation of 'events' lighting up in particular parts of the brain.  I can't see any significance attaching to such a claim:  did the same kind of brain event accompany the composition of Beethoven's Minuet in G as accompanied the Benedictus of the Mass in D?  These kinds of explanation ignore or do not even begin to understand all the different levels of scientific intentionality, with their appropriate and distinctive methodologies, up to the level of the phenomenological enquiry into the structures of meaning and being, and the sciences of meaning and being."

David Martin as interviewed by Rupert Shortt in God's advocates:  Christian thinkers in conversation (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2005), 161.

Hütter on Le Guillou on de Lubac on Aquinas

"Le Guillou's remarkable essay. . . . argues that while Aquinas indeed held the natural desire for the vision of God, this affirmation is fundamentally different from, albeit essentially related to, the desire for the supernatural, a desire elicited by the supernatural virtue of  hope.  The latter desire is fundamentally different because it is supernaturally elicited; however, it is essentially related to the natural desire, because it is that very natural desire (conditional by nature) that is presupposed as well as perfected by the supernaturally elicited desire.  Thus Le Guillou will show that rejecting the formula 'natural desire for the supernatur[a]l' in its precise sense does not entail a rejection of Aquinas's teaching at all.  On the contrary, on the basis of Aquinas's teaching this formula must be rejected."

Reinhard Hütter, "Aquinas on the natural desire for the vision of God:  a relecture of Summa contra Gentiles III, c. 25, après Henri de Lubac," The Thomist 73, no. 4 (October 2009):  570-571 (523-591).

Hütter on the existence of angels

The "pervasive contemporary inability to consider angels—and, alas, very widespread among Christians pace the recent New-Age discovery of 'angels' as a quasi-personalistic transcendence at the expense of God—displays not only a disconcerting lack of theological imagination but metaphysical acumen as well."

Reinhard Hütter, "Aquinas on the natural desire for the vision of God:  a relecture of Summa contra Gentiles III, c. 25, après Henri de Lubac," The Thomist 73, no. 4 (October 2009):  528n18 (523-591).