"even when [people] come to feel [the immanent frame] as obviously supporting closure, this doesn't constitute a valid argument. The sense of 'obvious' closure [against transcendence] is not a perception of rational grounding, but an illusion of . . . 'spin'. . . . [W]hile the norms and practices of the immanent frame may incline to closure, this neither decides the effect that living within the frame in fact will have on us, nor even less does it justify the closed take."

      Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 555.

"The issue here is not how many positive invocations of the body we hear"

      "But leaving these aspects and counter-movements aside, official Christianity has gone through what we can call an 'excarnation', a transfer out of embodied, 'enfleshed' forms of religious life, to those which are more 'in the head'.  In this it follows in parallel with 'Enlightenment', and modern unbelieving culture in general.  The issue here is not how many positive invocations of the body we hear; these abound in many forms of atheist materialism, as also in more Liberal Christianity.  The issue is whether our relation to the highest—God for believers, generally morality for unbelieving Aufklärer—is mediated in embodied form, as was plainly the case for parishioners 'creeping to the Cross' on Good Friday in pre-Reformation England.  Or looking to what moves us towards the highest, the issue to what degree our highest desires, those which allow us to discern the highest, are embodied, as the pity captured in the New Testament verb 'splangnizesthai' plainly is."

     Charles Taylor, A secular age (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 554.

A flat or bemused tolerance, as it were, but no fraternal correction

"The emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) gives a similar instruction on how to deal with someone who behaves rudely in the gymnasium:  'We keep an eye on him, not though as an enemy  nor from suspicion of him but with good-humored avoidance [(καίτοι φυλαττόμεθα, οὐ μέντοι ὡς ἐχθρόν οὐδὲ μεθ' ὑποψίας, ἀλλ' ἐκκλίσεως εὐμενοῦς)]' (Med. 6.20).  Unlike Paul, however, Aurelius demonstrates no interest in the reform of this offensive person and 'recognizes no duty of remonstrance towards the offender ὡς ἀδελφόν' ([as a brother; ]Moffatt 1901)."

     Jeffrey A. D. Weima on 2 Thess 3:6-15, 1-2 Thessalonians, Baker exegetical commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Academic, 2014), 627, but without Weima’s transliteration and more of the Greek (which I have taken from pp. 140-141 of the 1916 LCL edition ed. and trans. Haines).  Underscoring and boldface mine.
     Marcus Aurelius is invoking the dirty competitor figuratively:  "Act much in the same way in all the other parts of life.  Let us make many allowances for our fellow-athletes as it were.  Avoidance is always possible [(ἔξεστι . . . ἐκκλίνειν)], as I have said, without suspicion or hatred."
     And so a flat or bemused tolerance, as it were, but no fraternal correction.

"When I am among my seniors I am proof that games are forbidden; when I am among the wild, they think that I am younger than they."

     An anonymous 10th-century quatrain ("Tan bím eter mo shruithe

Dublin, Royal Irish Academy,
MS. 23 P 16 (early 15th cent.),
p. 90 | ISOS

") attributed to St. Mo Ling (d. c. 697; "Mo Ling dixit") and associated with 17 June, his feast day.  In Early Irish lyrics eighth to twelfth century, ed. and trans. Gerard Murphy (Oxford:  The Clarendon Press, 1956), 33 (32-33), 186 (185-186).  CODECS.

"God be with me"

Dublin, Royal Irish Academy,
MS 23 N 10 (16th cent.), p. 19 | ISOS

16 From here may they all protect me against the fog-surrounded demons, these companions of the King's Son from the lands of the living.

18 May my King guard me; may he aid me always; may I be at every need beneath the protection of God's hand.

     Anonymous (c. 900), "God be with me" ("Día lim fri cach sním").  In Early Irish lyrics eighth to twelfth century, ed. and trans. Gerard Murphy (Oxford:  The Clarendon Press, 1956), 27 (22-27), 180-183.  CODECS.  Royal Irish Academy.

"Let us adore the Lord, maker of wondrous works, great bright Heaven with its angels, the white-waved sea on earth."

Adram in Coimdid

     cusnaib aicdib amraib,

nem gelmár co n-ainglib,

     ler tonnbán for talmain.

     Anonymus (9th century), "Adram in Comdid."  In Early Irish lyrics eighth to twelfth century, ed. and trans. Gerard Murphy (Oxford:  The Clarendon Press, 1956), 4-5, 173-175.  "The ib ending in the dat. pl. adj. amraib suggests that the quatrain may be as early as the ninth century" (174).  CODECS.

"the choicefulness of life"

"my personal narrative splits from that of the American gay and lesbian movement.  The latter was based on choicelessness.  A choice may have to be defended—certainly, one has to be prepared to defend one's right to make a choice—while arguing that you were born this way appeals to people's sympathy or at least a sense of decency.  It also serves to quell one's own doubts and to foreclose future options.  We are, mostly, comfortable with less choice—much as I would have felt safer if my parents had not set out [from the Soviet Union] on their great emigration adventure." . . .

     "Also, some of the women I had known had become men.  That's not the way most transgender people phrase it; the default language is one of choicelessness:  people say they have always been men or women and now their authentic selves are emerging.  This is the same 'born this way' approach that the gay and lesbian movement had put to such good political use in the time that I'd been gone [in Russia]:  it had gotten queer people access to such institutions as the military and marriage.

     "The standard story goes something like this:  as a child I always felt like a boy, or never felt like a girl, and then I tried to be a lesbian, but the issue wasn't sexual orientation—it was gender, specifically, 'true gender,' which could now be claimed through transitioning.  I found myself feeling resentful at hearing these stories.  I too had always felt like a boy!  It had taken some work for me to enjoy being a woman (whatever that means)—I'd succeeded.  I had learned how to be one.  But still:  here I was, faced with the possibility that in the parallel life that my left-behind self was leading in the United States while I was in Russia, I would have transitioned.  True gender (whatever that means) didn't have much to do with it, but choice did.  Somehow, I'd missed the fact that it was there." .  . .

. . . In short, "I had failed, miserably, at seeing my [transgender] choices, made as they were under some duress, as an opportunity for adventure.  I had failed to think about inhabiting a different body the way one would think about inhabiting a different country.  How do I invent the person I am now?" . . .

". . . I lay no claim to someone I 'really am.'  That someone is a sequence of choices, and the question is:  Will my next choice be conscious, and will my ability to make it be unfettered?" . . .

     Masha Gessen on "the choicefulness of life," "the freedom to invent one's future, the freedom to choose," no matter the hand dealt.  "To be, or not to be," The New York review of books 65, no. 2 (February 8, 2018):  4-5.