Saturday, January 18, 2014

"A subjective conception of nature as 'objectively' devoid of God's presence would neatly serve a highly interested view of nature as 'disinterested'".

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"the conception of nature that from the seventeenth century increasingly sought to replace the traditional conception of nature as crea...

"'If his name's not Wagner, my name's not Farmer.'"

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     Enrico Fermi, vouching for Eugene Wigner at a high-security American checkpoint during World War II.      Fermi and I had been given ...

"Few things are as difficult as keeping clear about the distinction between God and creation as understood in traditional Christianity, and hence few things are as intuitive as unself-consciously regarding God as a quasi-spatial part within the whole of reality."

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     Brad S. Gregory,  The unintended Reformation:  how a religious revolution secularized society  (Cambridge and London:  The Belknap Pres...

Principalities and powers

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"the past has made the present what it is, but things did not have to turn out this way.  Institutionally and ideologically, materially...
Friday, January 17, 2014

"In the history of human thought, science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?"

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     Bernard Lewis, as quoted by Helen Rittelmeyer in "Bloodless moralism," First things, February 2014, 36.      But then, accor...
Tuesday, January 14, 2014

"They also are to be accursed that presume to say that every man shall be saved by the law or sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that law and the light of nature. For Holy Scripture doth set out to us only the name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved."

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     Article 18 of the Thirty-nine articles, as reproduced in Creeds and confessions of faith in the Christian tradition, vol. 2, part 4:   ...
Monday, January 13, 2014

A Father on "reading the Lives of the Fathers but not imitating [them]"

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"The same [elder] said:  'There are those who are wasting away their own days in negligence, who are seeking to be saved by thought...