"a kind of Ivy-fringed Jesus Seminar"

      The Harvard Divinity School as valued by Hollis Professor Karen King in the context of the fight to replace it with (or at least turn it into) a supposedly more respectable Faculty of Arts and Sciences department of religious studies, according to Ariel Sabar, in his Veritas:  A Harvard professor, a con man and the Gospel of Jesus’s wife (New York:  Doubleday, 2020), (Act five, Faustian bargain).  But does that mean that Sabar sides with the likes of Prof. Steven Pinker and his contempt for theology?

"'Enter into the joy of thy Lord'"

since no creature has the capacity for the infinite joy in his infinite goodness that the infinite God both [1] is alone suited for and [2] does in fact experience, "it follows that this perfectly full joy is not taken into man, but, on the contrary, [that] man enters into it, according to Matt. 25:21: Enter into the joy of thy Lord."

"Quia tamen nulla creatura est capax gaudii de Deo ei condigni, inde est quod illud gaudium omnino plenum non capitur in homine, sed potius homo intrat in ipsum, secundum illud Matth. XXV, intra in gaudium domini tui."

     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II.28.3.Resp., as trans. FEDP, i.e. Chapcote, opening paraphrase mine.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum.

The way and the light

"Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. . . .  How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages?  The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them."

     G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy:  the romance of faith (New York:  Image, Doubleday, 1990 [1908]), 147 ("IX.  Authority and the adventurer").

Jesus Circular

"a group that set out to tell the public what Jesus really said and did had decided that a vision in a book it called false could be the basis for the reality of Magdalene’s witness to a resurrection that never happened."

     Ariel Sabar, Veritas:  A Harvard professor, a con man and the Gospel of Jesus’s wife (New York:  Doubleday, 2020), 275.  "When I asked another [Jesus S]eminar scholar, Kathleen Corley, how the [affirmative] red vote on Mary’s witness to the resurrection came about, she said, ‘That’s all Karen King.'"

"On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry"

I had always assumed that this one is Anglican.  And, of course, it is—in the English translation by Chandler:

Jordanis oras praevia
Vox ecce Baptistae quatit:
Praeconis ad grandes sonos
Ignavus abscedat sopor.

Auctoris adventum sui
Tellus & aether & mare
Praegestiente sentiunt,
Et jam salutant gaudio.

Mundemus & nos pectora:
Deo propinquanti viam
Sternamus, & Dignam domum
Tanto paremus hospiti.

Tu nostra, tu, Jesu, salus;
Tu robur & solatium:
Arens ut herba, te fine
Mortale tabescit genus.

Aegris salutarem manum
Extende:  prostratos leva:
Ostende vultum, jam suus
Mundo reflorescet décor.

Qui liberator advenis,
Fili, tibi laus maxima
Cum Patre & almo Spiritu
In sempiterna secula.  Amen.

     Charles Coffin (1676-1749; also ODCC4), Hymni Sacri, Auctore Carolo Coffin, Ant. Universitatis Parisiensis Rectore, Collegii Dormano – Bellovaci Gymnasiarcha (Paris:  Sumptibus suis ediderunt Bibliopolae Usuum Parisiensium, 1736), 34 (32:  "In Adventu").

Weil on the banality of evil

     "Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continuously fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good.  No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil.  This is the truth about authentic good and evil.  With fictional good and evil it is the other way round.  Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm."

     "Rien n’est beau, merveilleux, perpétuellement nouveau, perpétuellement surprenant, chargé d’une douce et continuelle ivresse, comme le bien.  Rien n’est désertique, morne, monotone, ennuyeux comme le mal.  Il en est ainsi du bien et du mal authentiques.  Le bien et le mal fictifs ont le rapport contraire.  Le bien fictive est ennuyeux et plat.  Le mal fictive est varié, intéressant, attachant, profound, plein de séductions."

     Simone Weil (writing under the pseudonym Emile Novis), "Morale et littérature" ("Morality and literature"), Cahiers du sud:  revue mensuelle de littérature 31, no. 1 (janvier 1944):  40 (40-45), as translated in A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, "Touching the void:  Simone Weil’s ethical life class," Times literary supplement  no. 6392 (November 14, 2025):  20 (19-20).  "Morality and literature" is also present in several anthologies.

"Oh, [by] grace how great a debtor | Daily [God's] constrained to be"

"God is faithful and has put himself in our debt not because we have given him anything but because he has promised us so much. Yet even promising was not enough for him. He wanted to be bound in writing as well [(fidelis deus qui se nostrum debitorem fecit, non aliquid a nobis accipiendo, sed tanta nobis promittendo. parum erat promissio, etiam scripto se teneri uoluit)]. . . .  [Indeed, h]e was . . . not content to provide us with a written guarantee of his promises to help us believe in him. He even appointed a mediator to establish his good faith: not some nobleman, nor an angel, nor an archangel, but his only Son."  Etc.

     St. Augustine, Ennar. in Ps. 109.1-2, WSA III/19, trans. Boulding & Ramsey (2003), 261.  =CCL 40, p. 1601, ll. 11 ff.