Some Radnerian theological realism

"6. We cannot avoid repetition of the past’s mistakes
"This is an area where I have always sought to be prudent, looking at previous conflicts within the Church and within Anglicanism for indications of the way forward. My miscalculation, I think, has lain in my hope that we could in fact learn from our past mistakes! To acknowledge, as I now do, that we cannot so learn, however, is not an admission of despair. Rather, it is an embrace of the fact that faithful response to our conflict is not a matter of finding the magic bullet that will avoid the bad examples of the past. Faithful response, instead, is about confronting the sin endemic in our corrupted selves and ecclesial existences. This points us in very different directions than our usual strategic thinking, however well-informed by history. In short, the Christian historian is not after Thucidydes’ wisdom on this score, but rather Jesus’ own facing into the Last Days: you know what will happen, so be prepared, love and endure (Mt. 24:3-13)."

Ephraim Radner, "What I have learned these past five years: reflections in Advent, 2008," Anglican Communion Institute, Inc., http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=342#more-342. Words of wisdom from a professional historian with first-class credentials. The allusion may be to The Peloponnesian war I.i.22 ("if [my history] be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content"), I.v.123 ("'There is . . . no advantage in reflections on the past further than may be of service to the present'" (speech of the Corinthian delegation to the Second Congress at Lacedaemon)), and so forth (trans. Crawley & Feetham, GBWW, 2nd ed., vol. 5, pp. 354, 379). "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" the first edition of the Oxford dictionary of modern quotations attributes to Santayana (Life of reason (1905), vol. 1, chap. 12). I have not looked any harder than this.

How the sermon got into the Stevinus

"I cannot conceive how it is possible, quoth my uncle Toby, for such a thing as a sermon to have got into my Stevinus."

     Laurence Sterne, The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent., II.15 (GBWW, 1st ed., 1952, vol. 36, p. 254). How much restraint I must exercise, as I reread Tristram Shandy, you can't imagine.

Elliott on "The collapse of dogmatic Protestantism" (1893)

"The collapse of dogmatic Protestantism is our opportunity. Denominations, and 'creeds,' and 'schools,' and 'confessions' are going to pieces before our eyes. Great men built them, and little men can demolish them. This new nation cannot but regard with disdain institutions hardly double its own short life, and yet utterly decrepit; cannot but regard with awe an institution in whose life the Great Republic could have gone through its career nearly a score of times. I tell you that the vigor of national youth must be amazed at the freshness of perennial religion, and must soon salute it as divine. The dogmas of older Protestantism are fading out of our people's minds, or are being thrust out. It is not against the religion of men's ancestors, but against each one's religion of yesterday, as unsteady as it is recent in acquisition, that we have to contend--we who speak for Him who is of yesterday, and to-day, and the same for ever.
"Consider then, how it is with our noble-hearted friends: in their case it is religion wandering here and there in search of a church. How many earnest souls are about us, weary of doubtful teachings, glad to hearken to, ay and to believe, any one who promises them relief.
"See, too, and admire, how their religious instincts strive after organic life. As Calvinism dies, Christian Endeavor is born and counts a million members in a day--good works making little of faith, as at first faith made little of good works. See that while Methodism leaves the slums and is petrifying in lordly temples and in universities, the Salvation Army scours the gutters it has turned from with loathing."

Walter Elliott, "The missionary outlook in the United States," Catholic world 57, no. 342 (1893): 759 (http://tinyurl.com/8xh2jz). I am less interested in the Catholic triumphalism than the largely Newmanesque (?) insight into "The collapse of dogmatic Protestantism". How contemporary (if unoriginal) some of this sounds!

Dalrymple on "Coptic influence on the Celtic Church" and Islam

"The proudest boast of Celtic monasticism was that, in the words of the Antiphonary of Bangor:

This house full of delight
Is built on the rock
And indeed the true vine
Transplanted out of Egypt."

William Dalrymple, "The Egyptian connection," New York review of books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008): 79, online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21979. Pp. 79-80 especially are a popular summary of "Coptic influence on the Celtic Church" on the one hand, and emergent Islam on the other, such that "both the art and sacred calligraphy of Anglo-Saxon England and that of early Ummayad Islam grew at the same time out of the same East Mediterranean culture compost and common Coptic models": "if a monk from seventh-century Lindisfarne or Egypt were to come back today it is probable that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices and beliefs of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion, rather than the thoroughly Oriental faith it actually is." Practices, yes. But core beliefs? I don't know Sufism well enough to judge. Two further tidbits: "The Irish wheel cross, the symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth century, three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland" (here Dalrymple cites Walter Horn, "On the origins of the Celtic cross," in The forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael (University of California Press, 1990)); and "The theology of the Desert Fathers was deeply austere, with much concentration on judgment and damnation, a concern that they passed on to the Irish monks."

James on Bruckner on emancipation

"while the whole world, including the West, dealt in slaves, only the West came up with the idea of setting them free."

The "central message" of Pascal Bruckner's La tyrannie de la pénitence, according to Clive James. "Books of the year," Times literary supplement no. 5513 (November 28, 2008): 8.

I'm going to have to find a way to quote here the trombone solo in the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony

This is too much Edwards for one sitting, but he's just so darn quotable!

"there is a great difference between these two things, viz., lively imaginations arising from strong affections, and strong affections arising from lively imaginations."

Jonathan Edwards, The religious affections, pt. 3, sec. 4 ((Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1986 [1961]), 217). By "strong affections" the first time he uses it here, Edwards means, of course, "strong [true] affections," affections that arise "from the information of the understanding," just for example, i.e. affections characterized by all twelve of the truly "distinguishing signs".