Prospero on Caliban

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nuture can never stick; on whom my pains
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost; . . .

     Shakespeare, The tempest 4.1.188-190.  Cf., however, Prospero's "pardon" and Caliban's "trim", at 5.1.288-294.

The divine wisdom is "the art . . . of bringing the divine love to its complete realization."

". . . so nennen wir mit Recht neben der göttlichen Liebe die Weisheit als die Kunst gleichsam die göttliche Liebe vollkommen zu realisiren."

     F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube () par. 165.1.  I was put onto this by Janet Martin Soskice, "Being and love:  Schleiermacher, Aquinas and Augustine," Modern theology 34, no. 3 (July 2018):  490 (480-491).

"Who, having into truth by telling of it, | Made such a sinner of his memory | To credit his own lie—"

     Prospero of Antonio.  Shakespeare, The tempest I.2.100-102.

"If favor is shown to the wicked. . . ."

"when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.  If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals perversely and does not see the majesty of the Lord."

כַּאֲשֶׁ֤ר מִשְׁפָּטֶ֨יךָ֙ לָאָ֔רֶץ צֶ֥דֶק לָמְד֖וּיֹשְׁבֵ֥י תֵבֵֽל׃

יֻחַ֤ן רָשָׁע֙ בַּל־לָמַ֣ד צֶ֔דֶק בְּאֶ֥רֶץ נְכֹחֹ֖ות יְעַוֵּ֑ל וּבַל־יִרְאֶ֖ה גֵּא֥וּת יְהוָֽה׃

     Is 26:9b-10 RSV.  However this is to be fit into its context, and into biblical teaching as a whole, it makes a point not widely aired today.

A thoroughly admirable confession: Ian Bradley on some of the ways in which he misappropriated "Celtic Christianity"

". . . research by myself and others has made me realise that the original book was coloured too much by the naive zeal of the new convert and was overly romantic and simplistic in some of what it said both about particular themes and also about the uniqueness and particularity of Celtic Christianity.  I have also become more cautious about the use of this phrase and the concept that it denotes. . . .
". . . I am, for example, no longer inclined to view Celtic Christianity as either feminine—or eco-friendly, light on sin and judgement or particularly affirmative of the natural world and the intrinsic goodness of humanity.  I am much more conscious of the orthodoxy of the faith of the early Irish monks, their sense of human sinfulness and the importance of penitence and their belief in the awesome power as well as the presence of God.  I realize that, like others who wrote in those early heady days of the modern Celtic Christian revival, I was somewhat careless in conflating ancient and relatively modern sources and seeing them all as representing a single continuing entity.  I was also too ready to project my own dreams and prejudices into the mists of the far-distant past. . . .
". . . I have found my own very liberal Christian faith seriously challenged rather than reinforced and I have been made much more conscious of my own sin and frailty and of the themes of judgement and accountability.  This has been a much harder and more disturbing journey than the one which originally took me on to the Celtic way.  Maybe that is because I am older than when I first embarked on it but I think it is also because I have let the voices of the Celtic saints, their followers and chroniclers, speak to me more clearly and listened to them with less of a preconceived agenda about what I was hoping to hear from them.  If they have not quite turned this unrepentant old liberal into a conservative evangelical, they have certainly forced me [to] think much more seriously about subjects which are not naturally congenial to me. . . .
     "25 years on from The Celtic Way, this new book offers a more sober and measured appreciation of a significant tradition, perhaps one less exceptional and unique than I once thought, but nonetheless distinctive and important."

     Ian Bradley, Following the Celtic way:  a new assessment of Celtic Christianity (London:  Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2018), vii, ix-x, xi.  Cf. this.  Of the books he has published since The Celtic way first came out in 1993, Bradley cites especially Celtic Christianity:  making myths and dreaming dreams (1999) ("my most academic and deconstructionist work in this area") and Colonies of heaven =Celtic Christian communities:  live the tradition (2000).

Smith on an inescapable distinction

"American sociology's sacred project nonetheless insists on the 'moral' affirmation of everyone's choices and lifestyle by everyone else in his or her society, an insistence that is mindless and impossible.  Personalism distinguishes between those matters about which all humans must be affirmed—or, better, respected, loved, and treated with justice—and those that instead require their being challenged, debated, and sometimes even refused, precisely because they are loved."

     Christian Smith, "Appendix:  The alternative of critical realist personalism," in The sacred project of American sociology (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), 202 (199-204).  This amounts in the end, of course, to the ancient and unavoidable distinction between loving the sinner and hating the sin.

Smith on The sacred project of American sociology

"not many sociologists are as sociological about themselves as they are about the world around them.  They can carefully train their sociological scopes on everyone and everything beyond themselves, yet fail to see and name the basic true character of the [sacred] project that animates and directs their own professional endeavors. . . .  The only need . . . for any sociological analysis or debunking is to expose for transformation anything outside of sociology that gets in the way of realizing the sacred aspirations of that project.  That and only that is what the critical sociological eye is meant for."

     Christian Smith, The sacred project of American sociology (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), 175-176, italics mine.