"no longer . . . the cozy, comfortable middle-class world of the academy"

"it is hopelessly inadequate to reduce the issue to the pitting of one scriptural interpretation against another.  Revelation, unlike Scripture, is a threshold concept.  It is like crossing through a doorway into a whole new world that is not available to us until we get inside it and begin to explore it for ourselves.  To be sure, one has to identify a revelation.  To be sure, one has to interpret a revelation.  To be sure, one has to think through the application of divine revelation in new cultural or intellectual situations.  All these require the full mustering of all our cognitive capacities.  However, once one comes to see something as revelation, then one has to treat the revelation as knowledge.  One has to obey it, to hold tenaciously and even passionately to it, and in some instances to be prepared to die for it.
     "It is very easy to miss this point by retorting that when it comes to revelation the whole debate about the interpretation of revelation breaks out again.  As I have mentioned, of course, one has to interpret a revelation.  However, there is all the difference in the world in what is at stake once the issue is cast in terms of revelation.  One is no longer simply wrestling with a book or a set of texts.  One is wrestling with the word of God.  Sooner or later, whatever the complexity of interpretation, one has to fish or cut bait.  Either there is or there is not a revelation.  Either one has or has not gotten hold of it.  Once these issues are decided, one has crossed the threshold; and the call to treat the putative revelation as knowledge, to obey it, to be tenacious in holding to it, and to die for it kicks in immediately.  We are no longer living in the cozy, comfortable middle-class world of the academy.  We are dealing with the Word of God."

     William J. Abraham, "Chapter 1:  The Church’s teaching on sexuality:  a defense of the United Methodist Church’s Discipline on homosexuality," in Staying the course:  supporting the Church’s position on homosexuality, ed. Maxie D. Dunnam and H. Newton Malony (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2003), 24-25 (15-31).  Cf. his Crossing the threshold of divine revelation (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 2006) and this.

"The defining mark of irreligion is 'sociologism'"

"To [agree with but then] invert Hegel [as Marx did] is to say that philosophy resolves itself not in understanding, but in action—in praxis. But in this case, God, being, nature, truth—all forms of transcendence—simply cease to matter. It is not that their non-existence has been demonstrated by argument; indeed, atheism rests on a negative act of faith, which Del Noce will later exploit for his alternative philosophical history. It is that reason itself has been so transformed by the conflation of thought and praxis that transcendence has become, strictly speaking, unthinkable. God is not a question that can be posed seriously from within this conception of 'reason.' What matters now is history: the past historical and material conditions that make all truth claims into an expression of ideology, and the future historical conditions that will be changed by human praxis, that is, by science and political action, whose 'truth' is verified by its effectiveness.
     "The decisive element of Marx’s atheism is inseparable, in other words, from his rejection of the 'philosophy of comprehension.' And Marxist atheism surpasses all previous forms because it passes into irreligion, which defeats religion not by argument but simply by erasing God and the religious dimension from thought and life. This is the decisive reason that man after Marx is destined to become fully bourgeois—in Del Noce’s later formulation, 'a man whose life is completely determined by the category of usefulness, so that he desecrates everything he thinks about.' The defining mark of irreligion is 'sociologism,' which reduces all pretense of metaphysical truth to historical conditions and social or psychological functions within the immanent field of power relations that define modern politics, carrying a world of metaphysical assumptions in train. Sociologism makes anonymous atheists of us all, and one can measure the scope of its triumph within Christianity itself by the extent to which the social sciences have replaced metaphysics in the Church’s manner of thinking."

     Michael Hanby, "Del Noce's moment," First things no. 327 (November 2022):  60 (59-63).

"it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich"

"In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich."

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter of 13 September 1943 to his parents Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, Letters and papers from prison:  an abridged edition, new & greatly enlarged ed., ed. Eberhard Bethge & trans. Reginald Fuller, Frank Clarke, et al., as rev. John Bowden (New York:  Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1971), 109.

"In normal life one is often not at all aware that we always receive infinitely more than we give, and that gratitude is what enriches life [(Dankbarkeit macht das Leben erst reich)].  One easily overestimates the importance of one's own acts and deeds, compared with what we become only through other people."

     Dietrich Bonhoeffer, letter of 13 September 1943 to his parents Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer, Letters and papers from prison (Widerstand und Ergebung:  Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft), trans. , Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 8 (Fortress Press), 154 (2/57).

Injustice

"The law [of men] is unjust and inequitable.  Why have they chastised the woman and left the man unpunished?  The wife who has dishonored the bed of her husband is an adulteress, and the consequence of this are for her the harsh sanctions of the law; on the contrary, the husband who is unfaithful to his wife incurs no punishment.  I do not accept this legislation; I do not approve of this custom.  It is men who have legislated in this way; that is why this legislation is directed against the woman. . . . God does not act thus."

     St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390), Oration 37.6, as translated from the French of SC 318, 283-285, as reproduced in an article I read.

True freedom

"There is no [necessary] conflict between nature and culture, but [only] . . . a subtle interaction.  There are only two sexual identities, th[e two] that the man and the woman receive as a given from the [moment of] conception.  Culture [functions] as the invaluable auxiliary of nature, to the end that each might become what he really is. . . . [T]he human person [is] an integral whole [(un être harmonieux)] who must unfold in a harmonious fashion his whole life long out into what he [actually] is."

     Fr. Thomas le Taillandier de Gabory, O.P., "Gender:  laissez le 'sexe primer'!," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 116, no. 3 (July 2015):  125 (117-130), translation mine.  Fr. de Gabory, Ph.D. and S.Th.D., is also a doctor engaged in medical research.  From p. 121:

Above all, and this is the essential thing, there is a real plasticity of the brain.  This is a major discovery.  The brain is a dynamic organ of great plasticity. . . .  The brain is therefore a plastic organ, but it is in reality the [integrally] whole [human] being who is plastic.  Here science rejoins the [Christian] faith.  God always gives the person a chance to be converted.  Nothing is ever determined.  Man is never condemned to remain in evil.  It is thus that, until his last breath, [a] man can change; his brain and the whole of his entire being are supple, dynamic, plastic.

"the blessed, ever-virgin Mary, dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit"

Barbara Brocato

"O God, by whose will the blessed, ever-virgin Mary, dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, was on this day presented in the temple, we pray thee grant that through her pleading we may be found worthy to be ourselves presented in the temple of thy glory:  through our Lord . . . in the unity of the same Holy Spirit."

"Deus, qui beatam Mariam semper Virginem, Spiritus Sancti habitaculum, hodierna die in templo praesentari voluisti:  praesta, quaesumus, ut, eius intercessione, in templo gloriae tuae praesentari mereamur.  Per Dominum . . . in unitate eiusdem."

     Collect for the the Presentation of the BVM on 21 November, Tridentine missal.  This prayer was completely re-written after Vatican II, and now lacks the lovely phrase above, which echoes Eph 2:22 at least (for habitaculum occurs 48 times in the Vulgate):

Now therefore you are no more strangers and foreigners; but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone: in whom all the building, being framed together, groweth up into an holy temple in the Lord.  In whom you also are built together into an habitation of God in the Spirit.

Ergo jam non estis hospites, et advenae: sed estis cives sanctorum, et domestici Dei, superaedificati super fundamentum apostolorum, et prophetarum, ipso summo angulari lapide Christo Jesu: in quo omnis aedificatio constructa crescit in templum sanctum in Domino, in quo et vos coaedificamini in habitaculum [(κατοικητήριον)] Dei in Spiritu.

Cf. Lk 1:35. 

"Christ in his mercy . . . did not wish to be alone as the Son"

"As for our being the brothers and sisters of Christ, we can understand this because although there is only one inheritance and Christ is the only Son, his mercy would not allow him to remain alone.  It was his wish that we too should be heirs of the Father, and co-heirs with himself."

     St. Augustine, Sermon 72A.8 (417/418), as trans. Liturgy of the hours for the Feast of the Presentation of the BVM.  WSA III/3, trans. Edmund Hill (1991), 288.  Latin from Miscellanea Agostiniana 1 (1930), 163 ll. 13-16 (155-164):

I can understand brothers, I can understand sisters; it's because there is one inheritance, and therefore Christ in his mercy, while being the only Son, did not wish to be alone as the Son, but wished us to be heirs of the Father, his own fellow heirs. That inheritance, you see, is such that it cannot be reduced in value by any number of co-heirs.

fratres intellego, sorores intellego: una est enim hereditas; et ideo Christi misericordia, qui, cum esset unicus, noluit esse solus, voluit nos esse Patri heredes, sibi coheredes.