Sunday, January 19, 2014

"'How did they ever come to that place, those desolate multitudes, gathered under Satan's ashen skies?'"

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"'what the modern age has taught us is that the kingdom of hell is essentially a respectable place, where the devil is best served...

Ho hum

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"The wide demographic spread of unbelief is without question a modern story that belongs especially to social and cultural history, be...
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...